Gutsy Recently Started to Suddenly Freeze

[bilijoe]

Judging from all the posts it seems this is an issue with 7.10, Is there any reason why you can't just upgrade to 8.04.1? If its not an issue I recommend you upgrade. This is also proof that Ubuntu crashes which a large majority of the users seem to deny, Ubuntu has its own equivilent of the BSOD. Kernel Panicks.

I've been considering upgrading, but I'm still hearing rumblings that some instability problems remain. Re. Ubuntu crashing, I've been using it for a long time, some of my friends have been using it for years, and this is the first crash I, or any of my friends have encountered, and this thread contains the first reports I've heard of crashes. I'm not saying it doesn't crash (not any more, at least), but crashes appear to be so few and far between as to be statistically irrelevant. Anyway, no matter how you cut it, it does seem strange that there suddenly seems to be a rash of crashes (albeit small), all happening at roughly the same time, when 7.10 has been out there, running on, I presume, thousands of machines, for quite some time now, with no previous reports (that I know of) of crashing. Maybe it's an astrological thing, or maybe some numerologist can enlighten us about something to do with the numbers involved in yesterday's date, or something. It just seems too odd to be simple coincidence, to me. I still think it's Bill Gates, in a darkened roomsomewhere, chanting and sticking pins in a stuffed penguin doll.

[Jim!]

I too, never experienced Ubuntu 7.10 crashing and I was using it for at least a month after Ubuntu 8.04 was released. I suspect the crashing is probably due to a kernel upgrade that had issues with 7.10.

As for 8.04 they 're-released' it fairly recently as 8.04.1 which is 8.04 with all the updates included. (Well a large majority of the updates since 8.04.1 was released more updates have appeared. Which is good because it means Ubuntu is constantly becoming better then it already is.) I think you should just give 8.04.1 a try since it seems to be very stable now and will most likely work better then your current 7.10 install.

[LordKelvan]

Well, it happened again just now, so I doubt it has anything to do with a particular date

I was just typing away at the console, and then it froze on me. Again, I had Azureus running again - I don't know if this is part of the issue. Just in case it is, I have enabled logging in the application. Hey, swordsmith, which torrent client are you using (I'm asking just to see if maybe Azureus is the problem).

As for upgrading to 8.04.1, I have not because I have had a host of issues with 8.04.1 on another machine, including inexplicable (i.e., logs don't show anything) crashes

Outside of upgrading, does anyone have other suggestions? It seems odd that there would be a way for the kernel to crash, but without any log capturing an error message.

Cheers,
LK

[LordKelvan]

Well, I haven't experienced any more crashes - hopefully they were rare occurrences. I'll keep you guys posted if it happens again.

[Comhra]

I'm running Gutsy as well and have experienced no freeze-ups.

Strange that there's a cluster of them right now for some users.

[khangtoh]

I too had been experiencing this lockup, its very random for my case.

Sometimes I could be going for 5-6 hrs without a freeze and all the sudden it froze on me again. Sometimes it just freezes on me 20min after I reboot the system. It's getting to a frustrating state.

I tried to upgrade to ubuntu hardy using update manager and it froze on me when it was update manager was starting up. So I don't really have the courage to upgrade through update manager, maybe a disc upgrade.

Anyway, I turned off hyperthreading in my BIOs for now and will see if things get better.

[nitramf82]

I have been experiencing this as well. Full freeze, no keyboard or mouse, nothing in the system logs that seems to help. Caps lock blinks. Sometimes it doesn't happen for days, sometimes it happens every 15 minutes.

I have especially noticed it on the video site hulu.com. If you need to troubleshoot this problem, I recommend going there. Usually about 10 minutes into a video the whole system will lock up. Its usually accompanied by the last moment of audio repeating until I hold down the power button.

Only one time was I able to regain use of the keyboard and mouse after crashing, and the system was unstable with one of the CPUs stuck at 100%. This has also happened to me using Opera.

I originally thought it was a flash problem or a video card problem, but I've heard of this happening while using bit torrent, and for people using different video cards (I have the integrated intel one). The only other thing I can think of is ndiswrapper - are you guys using this? Or possibly just wireless networking in general?

If anyone can tell me what I could monitor while trying to reproduce this issue, please let me know. The default logs in the GUI tell me nothing