I’m experiencing an “Oh no! Something has gone wrong” error and it also states that I need to contact a system administrator.
I cannot interact with my computer in any way. This error started when I tried to load a save file in the game “Doodle Empires”. Last time I checked, I had around 200 GB of free space. I am unsure of my RAM amount and CPU model. I have tried unplugging and then replugging.
My steps to reproduce are: Launching Doodle Empires, attempting to load a saved game, and then the error message occurred, making my system unresponsive. How can I solve this issue, and prevent it from happening again? I haven’t gotten a response from Ask Ubuntu in nearly a week, so now I’m gonna try here.
I have had this error and it was graphics related in my case. It may help to supply more information about your system such as brand and model. I was able to remove the offending software via the live boot media as I remember.
My model is a HP Pavillion All in One, you might be right about the possibility that this is a graphics issue, since I believe that my computer somehow managed to crash while loading the save file and be unable to recover.
You can try to press CTRL + ALT + F3 and see if you get a terminal after that message shows, then login and look at /var/log/syslog to search for the related error.
Nothing is expected to happen, you are supposed to review the file to see what messages/errors are reported and take action and if you don’t understand it, post it here. Not the whole file but the last 20-30 lines.
Does your computer work after a reboot (switch power off and on or use reset button)? Or do do you keep getting this error now without launching Doodle Empires?
I have unplugged and replugged my computer and I get the same error, and my computer does keep getting the error even if I don’t have Doodle Empires open.
OK, when you see the “Oh no! Something has gone wrong” error, do you get a text based login prompt if you press CTRL + ALT + F3 keys simultaneously?
If that works, try to login with your username and password, then enter:
less /var/log/syslog
Press SHIFT + G to get to the end of the file (where the relevant error most likely is), then you can scroll up with PGUP key and down with PGDN key to look for errors.
Perhaps you can take photos of any errors you find, upload somewhere (e.g. https://imgbb.com/) and share those here via URL (link)?
OK, when in GRUB, choose “Advanced options for Ubuntu” and select the newest kernel which has “(recovery mode)” in the title. After that you should see another menu, select “dpkg - Repair broken packages” and see if that fixes your problem.
OK, perhaps there is something wrong with your filesystem after that game crashed. Enter GRUB menu again, same like last time, but this time in recovery menu; try the “fsck - Check all filesystems” option instead, select “Yes” if you get a question about remounting in read/write mode. After “fsck” is finished you can resume normal boot and see if it worked.
The Linux kernel has protection that will try to kill the application eventually if it’s allocating all your RAM during a crash (e.g. aggressive memory leak), but there is no protection against the application writing to disk for example. It’s rare these days, but crashes can happen where the kernel/OS (Linux) fails to handle the situation which leads to complete lockup and losing data since the only way out is to power off (or hard reset). Normally the filesystem (EXT4 by default) will attempt to repair itself during reboot automatically, but it can fail.
On the other hand, if you have a hardware problem, like bad RAM for example, or failing hard drive/SSD, then it is very likely something like this could happen since any write to disk could be corrupt where the system eventually crash completely.
