[Apparently SOLVED- see followup posts]
Yesterday, a strange and alarming thing happened to me while running the just-released Tails 0.14. I was working with Nautilus, organizing files on a LUKS volume, while Iceweasel was loading a graphic-heavy web page. All of a sudden, my screen went completely black, with nothing but a flashing bar-cursor. This lasted for several seconds, after which the round, spinning cursor, followed by the "Tails Greeter" appeared. Tails then completed the booting process (seemingly as normal), which itself is odd to me-- considering that there was no boot-medium present: I had removed the USB stick right after I had initially booted, since I had used the toram option.
If I had merely run out of RAM, wouldn't TAILS simply freeze? How could it just automatically, spontaneously reboot like that-- especially when there was no boot-medium present?!
Let me note the following:
the computer this happened with has 2 GB of RAM
This was my first time using the
toramoption at bootAfter experiencing the spontaneous reboot that I described above, I manually rebooted from scratch (again using the
toramoption) and did not experience anything unusual.
Might the seemingly spontaneous reboot that I experienced have been the result of a remote intrusion?
Are you confusing a full reboot with restarting your X session?
That's not much to play with - the ISO alone will eat almost half of it!
"toram" is "not supported" by the developers :o(
Might I suppose. It might have been a martian hiding in your system case and prodding things too. ;o)
Sounds to me like something killed your X session... Some ideas of what that "something" might have been, in what I'd consider to be roughly descending order of probability:
User error ;o)
Linux - intentionally - after running out of memory
Duff drivers (esp. video)
Overheating CPU
Loose electrical connection
Faulty RAM
Other assorted hardware faults
Other assorted software faults
Power surge
EM interference
Cosmic ray (yes, can happen!)
Bored martians
Angry mermaids
Other assorted mythological beasties
Intrusion
Ah! Comment 1 hadn't landed when I started comment 2...
ONLY happening with Tails >0.14~rc2? ..if so report a bug!
Otherwise, if it's sometimes happening in other OSs, move hardware faults up the list ;o)
I suspect I was indeed doing just that, now that you ask.
I hadn't realized that.
I take it that "not supported" means that you're completely on your own should you decide to try it.
A nano-Martian?
Did you really mean to place the possibility of intrusion below that of the four "possibilities" above-- even the three science fiction contingencies?
I suppose it's possible that I inadvertantly activated the keyboard shortcut for restarting X (though that seems unlikely, given that, If I recall correctly, it requires three separate keys to be pressed at once.
I hadn't realized this was a possibility; as I had written, I had thought that running out of RAM would have resulted in a freeze.
Yes but that still leaves 1 GB, which is the recommended minimum for running Tails.
Nonetheless, I probably was trying to do too much for what I had.
Regarding the other possibilities you listed, most would seem highly unlikely to me-- based on what I know of the conditions at the time of the occurrence and my extensive history with the same hardware, etc.
I haven't run
memtestfor a while, though, so perhaps I should now.Thank you very much for the detailed reply.
This thread seems like a case-in-point supporting the argument made in the the thread, ?Bug Reporting
As a direct result of posting to the forum and not filing an official bug report:
OP's question was promptly solved by one or more helpful anons
The Tails devs were spared time and trouble
Others with the same or similar experiences could benefit from merely reading the thread