[ubuntu-uk] Random lock ups in Jaunty

[Barry Titterton]

On Thu, 2009-10-08 at 16:53 +0100, Vinothan Shankar wrote:
> 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
> 
Thanks Vin,

This all sounds quite scary for a newbie like me. Can you please explain
what Enlightenment is, and how I go about installing it?

Cheers,

Barry