[ubuntu-uk] Random lock ups in Jaunty

[Vinothan Shankar]

Barry Titterton wrote:
> Has anyone experienced random hard lock ups since upgrading to Jaunty?
> 
> I am running Jaunty on an elderly Toshiba S1800 laptop (1GHz P3 with
> 512M of ram)and since upgrading to Jaunty last August I have been
> getting random hard lock ups; the cursor vanishes off the screen and the
> laptop becomes completely unresponsive. It can happen after five minutes
> or five hours, once or several times per day. I have not been able to
> find a key combination (Ctrl+Alt+Del etc) that will do anything; the
> mains button is the only option. The problem does not seem to be linked
> to any particular software as I have had two lock ups while only the
> desktop has been active. The common factor is that they only occur while
> I am moving the cursor across the screen. I do not think it is a
> hardware problem as the laptop ran Intrepid for six months with no
> problems, except for the traditional Toshiba over heating which always
> resulted in the machine shutting itself down rather than locking up.
> 
> I have Googled this but have not found anyone with exactly the same
> symptoms. I am hanging on to see if Karmic will solve the problem before
> reverting to Intrepid. Does anyone have any suggestions?
> 
> Barry

I had an issue quite recently with Jaunty locking up to the extent that
ctrl+alt+1 wouldn't frop to a text terminal, and ctrl+alt+backspace
wouldn't restart the X server even though I disabled DontZap...  I was
still able to alt+sysrq+REISUB, but that's not something I wanted to do...

It seemed to be a problem with window managers.  I tried Enlightenment
and it became stable, so I'm sticking with E for now.  I don't know if
it's relevant, but you may want to see if you get the same issue if you
install and use E16 (or E17, but that requires adding another repo and
key, which you mayb not want to do...)

E is also a _lot_ lighter than GNOME, and E17 at least provides most of
its features despite being a window manager rather than a desktop
environment.

Hope that helps, even though it's slightly tangential.

Vin