[COLUG] Odd hardware / graphics behavior under C5

[Joshua Kramer]

All,

Has anyone had issues with CentOS 5 randomly freezing when attempting to 
open a menu in OpenOffice 2.2?

This is an odd kind of freeze.  The image on-screen freezes; the keyboard 
becomes unresponsive, even to the point that the keyboard lights (NumLock, 
etc) don't respond.  Nothing does - not CTRL+ALT+DEL, not CTRL+BACKSPACE. 
Usually in the past when this has happened to a linux system, it's been 
flaky hardware, but it's been locked to the point you have to pull the 
power cord.  However, in this case I can SSH into the box and see that 
it's a normal system load (not 100% cpu) and plenty of RAM / swap 
available.

Ok, looks like with my fiancee's help I narrowed it down to the Xorg 
subsystem.  If she uses NX to connect to the same user account, OpenOffice 
runs just fine.  So there is some issue with the Xorg driver for the Intel 
815 chipset, or maybe my hardware is going south.  (I've already had one 
issue where one of the fan ports on the mobo died, and that happened to be 
the CPU fan.  This is a Shuttle case and mobo.)

I wonder how I could tell what's going wrong with the Xorg driver for 
Intel?

Later,
-J