How to find cause for laptop crashing

[Guido Heumann]

Mark Allen Sheely schrieb:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm pretty new to Linux, and could use some advice. Here's the problem:
> 
> Using Celestia (I'm sure some of you are familiar with it) causes my
> laptop to crash. What happens is that after using it for a few minutes,
> the screen goes blank, and then it slowly flickers between black and
> gray. After about a minute, the screen turns black and stays that way no
> matter what I do.
> 
> I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the software, and get the same
> problem. I end up having to manually turn off and restart my laptop.
> 
> So, my question is: How do I find out what is causing this? Is there a
> way that I can see some kind of error message upon startup that can give
> me some sort of insight into why my laptop is crashing?
> 
> Thanks for the help,
> Mark
> 

I can't help you with celestia specifically, but perhaps you could use
one of these to find out more about the problem:

- start celestia from a terminal instead from the application menu. Just
open a terminal, type the command (probably "Celestia" or "celestia")
and see if there are error messages in the output.

- install SSH server and try to login from a second PC when the first
starts to hang. From the console you can then try to find out which
process is the hanging one. (not much help here either ;-) I would start
with "top" and from there kill processes selectively until the main
screen is usable again)

HTH,
Guido