How to debug crash on laptop with no serial port

[Denis Hennessy]

I'm trying fedora on an IBM X31 laptop which has no native serial 
port*.  I've tried various kernels including 2.4.22-1.2135.nptl, 
2.4.22-1.2149.nptl and 2.6.1-1.53. After running for somewhere between 3 
hours and 2 days, the machine will lock up hard. X will freeze and 
nothing short of a power cycle will get any response. Sometime, the caps 
lock light will be flashing.

The only other wierdness (I'm not sure it's related) is that 
applications will occasionally exit for no reason. This frequently 
happens with mozilla although it may be mozilla bug for just because I 
spend a lot of time using it.

When this happened on different computers, I was able to set up a serial 
console to capture the crash details but I'm at a loss for what to do 
with this machine. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Denis

* The laptop itself has no serial port but the docking station does. I 
don't know how the docking station port should appear in linux (I'm 
pretty sure it's not /dev/ttyS0).

[root at lemming root]# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82855PM Processor to I/O Controller 
(rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82855PM Processor to AGP Controller (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB USB (Hub #1) (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB USB (Hub #2) (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB USB (Hub #3) (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB USB2 (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BAM/CAM PCI Bridge (rev 81)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801DBM LPC Interface Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801DBM Ultra ATA Storage Controller 
(rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBM SMBus Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB AC'97 Audio 
Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corp. 82801DB AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 01)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility 
M6 LY
02:00.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev aa)
02:00.1 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev aa)
02:00.2 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C552 IEEE 1394 Controller 
(rev 02)
02:02.0 Network controller: Intel Corp. PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini 
PCI Adapter (rev 04)
02:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82801BD PRO/100 VE (MOB) 
Ethernet Controller (rev 81)
[root at lemming root]#