Freeze in Jaunty

[olskar]

Since installing a clean copy on Jaunty I get random freezes. This is on computers with Nvidia and ATI-cards. It's not a hardwareproblem since Intrepid can run for days without freezing.

From what I've seen, there is a couple of other people having the same problem?

Anyone know if there is a bugreport on this?

[Stenico]

My experience - 2 hard lock freezes in 20 minutes after upgrading to Jaunty.

Reading people's similar experiences, all I can say is that either Canonical's pre-release testing procedures are a joke, or they simply don't care.

I can't help but contrast this experience with my full-time use of Windows 7 *beta* during which I've experienced one serious crash in 3 months.

I would prefer to be using linux, but I won't be using Jaunty over my Win 7 install in a hurry .

[nandemonai]

Been running since Beta here and I haven't had one lockup at all.

Highest uptime would be around a week before reboot for kernel upgrade or just wanting to give the machine a rest for whatever reason.

Restricted drivers, restricted extras and many additional programs and servers.

Stability will vary I guess depending on your hardware. You realise 1. Jaunty has just been released and 2. It's not a LTS (stable) release right?

Kinda irks me the constant comparisons between Linux and Windows on these forums.

[Stenico]

How many, alpha's, betas and RC's has Jaunty been through? And its still very broken on a lot of hardware.

I know its not an LTS, but that doesn't mean UI hard-freezes are acceptable surely?

How hard is it for Canonical to buy a bunch of commodity hardware and run standard tests before making releases? (I bet Dell/HP etc would donate boxes to them!)

Given my experience with Jaunty and other recent releases there is no way I can recommend Ubuntu as a "just works" distro as I used to do at one time.

[nandemonai]

How hard is it for Canonical to buy a bunch of commodity hardware and run standard tests before making releases? (I bet Dell/HP etc would donate boxes to them!)

Not really the way it works. Ubuntu is a community driven project, Canonical merely provides support and advertising. You're talking about majority volunteer work here.

That being said things are tested pretty well. I'm curious as to what kind of hardware you're running on?

If it's 'bleeding edge' you can't really expect full support.

Did you participate in the alpha / beta? Submit bugs? Have you checked the HCL?

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport/
http://www.ubuntuhcl.org/

[Stenico]

I'm running a three year old Dell dimension 9200 Intel Core 2 Duo machine with a Nvidia 7900GS with no significant hardware changes or additions.

Intrepid, Freebsd, Vista and Win7 all run on this machine without a hitch.

If you read the forums, these freezes are happening to people on different hardware including Intel, ATI and nVidia graphics cards.

Despite the large and admirable community contribution Ubuntu is very much run by Canonical, with the clear aim of becoming profitable. They need to sort their testing infrastructure out if they want to avoid losing community mindshare on the linux desktop, which is ultimately what will drive them to profibility.

[crowin]

How hard is it for Canonical to buy a bunch of commodity hardware and run standard tests before making releases? (I bet Dell/HP etc would donate boxes to them!).

I am very happy with the FREE operating system. Why dont you donate all of your old out of date equipment to open source? Get real, the people who write and test this are doing the world (including you) a service. How many versions of open source Windows are being developed? None! Linux is for people, not for customers.
Have a nice day.

[roberthr]

Same here on using Jaunty on 4 different machines. It's working without a glitch on these machines:

Laptop Dell Inspiron 1525 ext4 and Intel driver
Desktop MB Gigabyte M57SLI-S4, nVidia 8400 GS with nVidia driver and ext4

Now the problematic machines (where Interpid worked without a problem):

Desktop MB Gigabyte nVidia-nForce2, nVidia 6200 and ext4 - on this one, programs keep crashing (aMSN, Thunderbird, Firefox, SMplayer...).

Syslog message when programs crashed:

May  5 17:59:49 bdesktop pulseaudio[3150]: alsa-util.c: Device front:0 doesn't support 44100 Hz, changed to 48000 Hz.
May  5 17:59:49 bdesktop pulseaudio[3150]: alsa-util.c: Device front:0 doesn't support 44100 Hz, changed to 48000 Hz.
May  5 17:59:49 bdesktop pulseaudio[3150]: alsa-util.c: Device hw:1 doesn't support 44100 Hz, changed to 16000 Hz.
May  5 17:59:49 bdesktop pulseaudio[3150]: alsa-util.c: Device hw:1 doesn't support 2 channels, changed to 1.
May  5 18:00:45 bdesktop kernel: [   79.225355] ondemand governor failed, too long transition latency of HW, fallback to performance governor

Desktop MB Gigabyte M55S-S3, nvidia 7600 GS and ext4 - this one completly locks up. It's not even possible to connect through ssh, so only reset helps.

Syslog message around freeze:

May  5 14:13:14 asgard pulseaudio[3593]: alsa-util.c: Device hw:1 doesn't support 44100 Hz, changed to 32000 Hz.
May  5 14:13:14 asgard pulseaudio[3593]: alsa-util.c: Cannot find fallback mixer control "Mic" or mixer control is no combination of switch/volume.
May  5 14:14:05 asgard kernel: [   81.012031] Clocksource tsc unstable (delta = -282068898 ns)

Since nobody has yet narrowed what seems to be the problem, is there any way to debug those two machines to get more useful data what happened? I know it will be difficult on hard lock-ups, because there's nothing logged and I can't connect through ssh to see what's going on.

I agree, this is really serious problem and I had to put friends that want to upgrade to Jaunty, on hold.

[utkjamie]

I am very happy with the FREE operating system. Why dont you donate all of your old out of date equipment to open source? Get real, the people who write and test this are doing the world (including you) a service. How many versions of open source Windows are being developed? None! Linux is for people, not for customers.
Have a nice day.

I don't think anyone is questioning the loyalty or dedication of the Ubuntu team. Yes, the OS is free but that doesn't mean that users are expected to endure potentially destructive bugs. Losing data or being unable to work is bad. I doubt anyone is thinking "Gee, I just lost 200 MB of family photos, but hey since I don't pay for the OS I'm totally cool with data loss every now and then."

[Stenico]

I am very happy with the FREE operating system. Why dont you donate all of your old out of date equipment to open source? Get real, the people who write and test this are doing the world (including you) a service. How many versions of open source Windows are being developed? None! Linux is for people, not for customers.
Have a nice day.

No. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu linux want to become profitable and make money. They are trying to monetise the efforts of people who write open-source software. That we get Ubuntu desktop linux free from them (for which I am very grateful and happy) is a side-effect of their strategy to make money from selling linux products and services.

Canonical make the Ubuntu *distribution* of linux, and by giving it away for free hope to demonstrate to private enterprises that it is good enough for them to use and buy service contracts from Canonical. They spend a lot of money towards this aim. I'm suggesting they should spend more of this money on testing their software before release if they want to persuade people its good enough for commercial use.

If you want to use a truly free distribution of linux, investigate the Debian distribution, which Ubuntu is based on.