8.04 randomly freezing requiring hard shut down, caps and scroll lock flash

[JamesRock]

I said I was going to switch to FreeBSD to avoid this problem but instead I just tried upgrading to Intrepid. Well, the difference is amazing. ZERO crashes, I'm starting to trust my computer to be stable again and I actually feel confident opening programs like Totem.

So for anyone who is still having this issue trying an upgrade might be the way to go, it worked for me!

[2CV67]

Just to add my bit.

Since installing Hardy I am having this problem on a non-Dell non-portable.

It is a desktop Acer Aspire T120 with AMD Athlon XP.
512M RAM.
WiFi by Edimax EW-7128g PCI card (RT2561).
Nothing fancy.

It has run XP since 2004 & dual-booted Ubuntu (Edgy-Fiesty-Gutsy) since 2006 with no similar symptoms.
XP continues OK. (I hate to say this, but without XP I would have been dead in the water too many times...).

I did a clean install of Hardy on 15 August (so can't try earlier kernels again) and since then have had at least 8 attacks of everything freezing with Caps lock & Scroll lock flashing steadily.
So far, this has always happened when I am in Firefox and when I am actually using the mouse.

I ran MemTest for 2 passes with no errors.

I would like to think this problem is getting somebody's attention!

Thanks for all your persistence with this thread.

[jimbofluffy]

Just to add my bit.

Since installing Hardy I am having this problem on a non-Dell non-portable.

It is a desktop Acer Aspire T120 with AMD Athlon XP.
512M RAM.
WiFi by Edimax EW-7128g PCI card (RT2561).
Nothing fancy.

It has run XP since 2004 & dual-booted Ubuntu (Edgy-Fiesty-Gutsy) since 2006 with no similar symptoms.
XP continues OK. (I hate to say this, but without XP I would have been dead in the water too many times...).

I did a clean install of Hardy on 15 August (so can't try earlier kernels again) and since then have had at least 8 attacks of everything freezing with Caps lock & Scroll lock flashing steadily.
So far, this has always happened when I am in Firefox and when I am actually using the mouse.

I ran MemTest for 2 passes with no errors.

I would like to think this problem is getting somebody's attention!

Thanks for all your persistence with this thread.

This is very similar to the issue I had both hardware wise and symptom wise. If I remember correctly I had the same issue on a Dell and and Emachine with an Athlon XP, which has since had a major meltdown, but the issue went away when I installed the proprietary drivers for the card with ndiswrapper rather than using the default ones with Ubuntu.

[useResa]

I ran MemTest for 2 passes with no errors.

I did the same, with the same result

I would like to think this problem is getting somebody's attention!

+1

Thanks for all your persistence with this thread.

Thank you for posting your experiences.

[GryphElyse]

I said I was going to switch to FreeBSD to avoid this problem but instead I just tried upgrading to Intrepid. Well, the difference is amazing. ZERO crashes, I'm starting to trust my computer to be stable again and I actually feel confident opening programs like Totem.

So for anyone who is still having this issue trying an upgrade might be the way to go, it worked for me!

Is Intrepid a new release, like Hardy? If so do you think that there would be no kernel crash with Intrepid even when installing straight on a machine?

[useResa]

Is Intrepid a new release, like Hardy?

Yes, Intrepid is the new release (more info here) which is scheduled to be released in October.

If so do you think that there would be no kernel crash with Intrepid even when installing straight on a machine?

The thing that you have to keep in mind is that the current version for Intrepid is Alpha 4. So still very much pre-release. And as with all pre-release versions ... things may go wrong.
You may no longer have the kernel panic, but you may be faced with breakage anyway.

[mp035]

Hi All, I am experiencing the same problems, only recently.

My system is Intel 2160 (2x64) Nvidia 7?00 GT 2GB ram.

No problems until I pulled an old (Dlink) wifi card out of the cupboard.

This card has always been awful under linux (that's why it was in the cupboard.)

The card uses the Ralink 2561 chipset which uses the (rt61.ko) RT61 drivers.

Just did an lsmod to check, and these apprear to be the modules that are installed.

rt61pci 27648 0
rt2x00pci 12800 1 rt61pci
rt2x00lib 25344 2 rt61pci,rt2x00pci


I see a few people with rt2561 in the 6 pages of this post that I read, so perhaps people should be looking into what drivers/chipset their wifi is using, maybe we'll have a common point?

Thanks to all posters on this thread.

[2CV67]

I started a thread on this subject on the French forum, specifically with RT2561:
http://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic...47622#p2047622

Bashar suggested in that thread the problem could be due to the current version of rt61pci (2.0.10) and could be fixed by updating to rt61pci version 2.1.4

I did this & after a few hours use everything is still working OK.
This is too early to confirm a fix, but looks hopeful.

I have some reservations about the method, which involved temporarily opening the backport repositories...
I see I let in Firefox 3.0 at the same time & heaven knows what else!

You may still like to give it a try (at your own risk - I am TOTALLY incompetent at recommending actions in Ubuntu).
EDIT: SOME USERS HAD PROBLEMS - SEE POSTS #199 & #204...

Maybe somebody has a cleaner way of updating to rt61pci version 2.1.4?

Many thanks anyway to Bashar & the French forum, which often helps when I get stuck here...

I will report if I get any further freezes...

[2CV67]

I am now convinced that changing rt61pci from version 2.0.10 to version 2.1.4 has fixed this problem for me - a RT2561 user.

[mempman]

Im on hp dv2000 series laptop and I experience total system freezing while I'm running on battery power. This problem is reallllly annoying cause there aren't even any logs or any other traces left after the crash to troubleshoot the problem. By reading this thread, it occured to me that this problem might somehow be related to Nvidia GPUs? Anybody have this similar problem on any non-Nvidia GPU?