Hardy freezes

[dcollamore]

Thanks for the tip! I just finished reading through all the comments, and it appears to be describing exactly what I'm seeing.

For anyone who runs across this, so far it looks like it's a problem with the GENERIC kernel, the SERVER kernel, and possibly the 386 kernel, but it looks like (possibly) the -rt kernel is stable, albeit at a slight performance hit. This kernel should be in the standard repository, so nothing special needed beyond some apt-getting. I'm going to give it a shot, I'll report back with what I find out.

[dreamsR4living]

I have the same problem. I am using Ubuntu since Dapper Drake and I have always been amazed with Ubuntu's stability. Within two years Ubuntu did only freeze for two or three times, but with Hardy it seem to happen 2 or 3 times a day.

My Hardware;

Acer Aspire 9302
AMD Turion 64, 2.2 GHZ
1 GB DDR2 Memory
Nvidia GeForce Go 6100 384 MD
Broadcom (BCM43) Wireless

When this problem continues, I will go back to Gutsy too

[dcollamore]

dreamsR4living - Have you tried the -rt kernel? If you open up a terminal window, and type in:

sudo aptitude install linux-image-rt linux-restricted-modules-rt

and hit enter, you can give that a shot. I have nothing conclusive yet, but it hasn't hard-locked on me either. It's worth a shot before downgrading to Gutsy.

[dreamsR4living]

dreamsR4living - Have you tried the -rt kernel? If you open up a terminal window, and type in:

sudo aptitude install linux-image-rt linux-restricted-modules-rt

and hit enter, you can give that a shot. I have nothing conclusive yet, but it hasn't hard-locked on me either. It's worth a shot before downgrading to Gutsy.

Thanx, I'm going to give it a try for a few days and will report my results later on

[dreamsR4living]

I have installed the RT Kernel, but the problem is still there. Maybe it is not a kernel related problem?

[Mighty_Joe]

Switching to the RT kernel did not solve my problem either. Tried twice and got hangs within minutes of booting.

[dcollamore]

Hmm...mine (appears) to continue being stable. I guess I'll have to wait and see. On a related note, I just did a fresh install on my notebook (Dell Inspiron 8600, vastly different hardware), and it's been stable as a rock.

This is going to be a real bear to troubleshoot.

[rmccabe3701]

I installed hardy two days ago the freeze issue is unbearable. My machine is a
HP dc7700 2Gb RAM and an nvidia 5200 GeForce FX video card.

I read on another thread that doing

 sudo apt-get remove powernowd

would help. It did not. I tried installing the nvidia driver directly from the nVidia website (not using the restricted driver manager) and this seemed to make things worse, i.e. the system would ALWAYS freeze up within 30-60 seconds of a boot. So, I rolled back to the generic video driver and no more freezes -- however, this only supports a single monitor.

So, the problem for me seems to be the incompatibility of Hardy with the nVidia driver (it worked in Gutsy).

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[pete0085]

I have the same problems. I installed Ubuntu for the first time 2 days ago and not sure what to do. Fedora never locked up on me, but was more difficult for me to use as I don't honestly know what I'm doing in Linux. I'm open to any suggestions???

[dcollamore]

pete0085 - As far as I can see at this point it's not been completely pinned down yet. This issue seems to occur on vastly different hardware, and hard-crashes the kernel to the point that logging is very vague and inconclusive. Some people report that it may be related (for them) specifically to their wireless card. Others that it is related to the closed-source nVidia or ATI video drivers.

This appears to be a rather serious and somewhat widespread issue, but sadly I do not have the skills or time necessary to completely pin it down. I'd subscribe to this thread and watch for possibilities. As soon as I see a real solution (provided someone else hasn't seen it first and posted it) I'll post it. In the mean time, you can try installing the -rt kernel (see previous message for more details, or feel free to ask for more specifics if you need further help); this seems to be keeping my system stable so far.

I will say, I've used Ubuntu specifically since Hoary Hedgehog (Debian before that), and I've never seen as serious an issue as this in an initial release in all that time. That concerns me in a LTS release. I suspect the more "dynamic" development model of the kernel itself may have something to do with it.