[Bug 585765] Re: Ubuntu 10.04 random freezes

[Señor Miller]

I had been seeing this problem on a new ThinkPad W510 running 10.04.

The symptom I was seeing was that the screen would lock up at random
times over the course of the day, sometimes after several hours, other
times after just a few minutes.  I saw lockups after leaving the machine
running while I was away from it, but more frequently while  actively
using the machine.  Typically, lockups would happen when I did something
actively, such as clicking on a link in Firefox or hitting the return
key while in gnome-terminal.  In most cases, the cursor arrow could be
moved about the screen, but the system would not respond to any input
from keyboard or mouse.

After reading this thread, I tried to ssh into my machine while it was
locked up.  I never found a case when this failed to work.  In every
case, top showed Xorg running near 100% CPU utilization.  I tried to
kill Xorg by sending it a signal, but a new Xorg process (with a new
PID) would be created, executing at 100% CPU utilization, and still
unresponsive to keyboard and mouse.

A coworker with a similar setup to mine said he wasn't seeing any
problems like this but that he had had similar problems when he first
installed Ubuntu 10.04.  After comparing notes, it came to light that he
had switched from the free graphics driver that Ubuntu installs by
default to the proprietary non-free NVidea driver.

I switched to the non-free driver last week and have not seen the
problem even once since switching.

I am able to run pulse audio, and I'm even able to turn on desktop
effects that were sure to kill my old T40.

-- 
Ubuntu 10.04 random freezes
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/585765
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