[SOLVED] 8.10 randomly freezing caps lock blinking flashing

[KyleBrown]

Thank you!

[TechBeastie]

Hi everybody,
I think I may have happened upon a definitive fix for this bug.
First off, a bit of background:
My laptop has been afflicted by this delightful problem ever since I installed Intrepid a couple of months ago, and not having had the time to do anything about it, I've been getting along by keeping my wireless card (an Intel ABG3945) turned off and its drivers disabled. Though obviously somewhat irksome, this workaround has proved to be 100% effective at banishing the "flashing Caps lock of death;" at least in my case, the problem only occurs when my wireless card is active*.

This evening, however, I was in a situation where I needed to have wireless access, and after I was forced to reboot my machine for the the third time in 15 minutes, I decided that it was high time to sit down and figure out whether it was possible to actually fix this horrible glitch.
I therefore dutifully went and installed the backports package - but because I had read that this "fix" was far from universally effective, I also went a step further, and downloaded the very latest version of the driver package for my hardware directly from the linuxwireless.org site. Running

modprobe -l *iwl*

reveals that the wireless drivers my system is currently using (and has been using, for the past several hours, without any problems) are the ones supplied by the package from linuxwireless - so assuming that this new-found stability holds, I think that this may be another good fix to try (after all, installing the driver directly does essentially the same thing as installing the backports package - and the driver you get is much newer than the one bundled into backports (and hopefully less buggy as a consequence).

Hope someone else finds this useful!

*Actually, I've encountered a similar but not-quite-identical type of catastrophic crash (in which the keyboard and/or mouse lock up, and appear to completely loose power) on a couple of Linux distros, and I've narrowed the cause of that aberration down to some feature of the power management/screensaver utilities. In Ubuntu, for example, the problem can be vanquished by disabling all GL (3D) screensavers. Don't ask me why.

[SaintDanBert]

... blinking LED ...

Is there a list of all of these sorts of omens and signs that something is happening?

... Kernel Panic ...

Is there magic we should configure so that we capture maximum information when a kernel panic happens? Sadly, my workstation and configuration are plagued by them whenever I run a type-N wireless connection.

...
P.S. the most proper way to power off the system in this situation is by
using the magic sysrq keys ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

SysRq is the same as the Print Screen button on most keyboards and
to power off the system you could send a Sync and Off :

[Alt]+[SysRq]+s
[Alt]+[SysRq]+o

I also believe that one must wait "a few seconds" between commands.
Is there any visual indication that good things are happening?

What does one do if SysReq (in blue) requires an extra Fn-key (in blue) to activate?

Is this a multi-key chord -- press and hold ALT + press and hold SysReq + then press 's'?

I vaguely remember that there is a list of these magic keys somewhere can you refresh where they are documented?

Thanks,
~~~ 0;-Dan

[FrancoNero]

yeah and since this is still a bug in lucid, it's far from really being solved. plus, why does it occur randomly, i mean really randomly?

[yamagami]

Yes - still a nightmarish bug in lucid on my thinkpad T61P.
everytime i think i know why it happens it happens in a different scenario.
Turning off compiz, installing backports etc seem to make it happen less often. But it still does happen still...
Grrr