🚀 go-pugleaf

Beartooth wrote:
> 
>         Recently, whenever I boot up -- and often when I
> give some command -- the computer makes fervent whirring
> noises, and keeps the little red light either blinking fast,
> or on continuously (perhaps there are blinks so fast I can't
> see them), but without doing anything visible.

Well -- 

once you get it up and running, try the following:

ps auwx 
	Will let you know all of the processes running, as a rule. 
df
	gives you the sizes of your drives, and their status/fullness
top 
	table-of-processes -- if something starts up and starts 
	sucking memory, this is a good tool to let you know 

dmesg 
	will give you all kernel messages since boot time.

You will probably want to pipe it through `less` , as in, `dmesg | less` and
you might also want to try `ps auwx | less` as well.


This sounds to me as if you've got some process running which is taking up a
lot of memory, and it's getting into the swap-drive virtual memory. `top`
will tell you a lot about this.

Also, pop up an xterm for each of these, and `cd /var/log` and then `tail -f
syslog` and in the other xterm, in /var/log, `tail -f messages`

If things start getting clunky, chances are that something will appear in
the syslog or messages file if it's some sort of actual error, if it's just
memory hogs putting an overload on the swapdrive, `top` is almost certain to
pick it up. Maybe leaving one xterm for each of `tail -f /var/log/syslog`
and `tail -f /avr/log/messages` and perhaps for `top` might be a good idea. 

Taking a look at all of the files in /var/log/ is generally recommended in
any case. 

Oh, when in `tail`, <ctrl-c> will release the terminal back to you.

-- 
    Be kind to your neighbors, even though they be transgenic chimerae.
Whom thou'st vex'd waxeth wroth:  Meow. <-----> http://earthops.net/klaatu/