Breezy on laptop slow and unstable

[Ed Fletcher]

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Christoph Bier wrote:
| Hi all!
|
| Some months ago I migrated my laptop from Sarge to Hoary and some
| weeks ago to Breezy. Now, that I had to use the laptop quite often
| again, I noticed that it runs very slowly and unstable (in contrast
| to sarge; while Hoary was installed I didn't use the laptop that
| much). Sometimes the mouse pointer doesn't react for (many) minutes,
| the whole GUI seems to be frozen; no updates in the watched log
| files and gkrellm (sometimes the clock is updated). pings are then
| answered with no noteworthy delay (time=0.2 ms) but remote login via
| ssh is very slow i.e. it takes about one to fifteen(!) minutes until
| I get prompted for the password. Viewing `top' remotely shows
| nothing special. But X or GNOME still seem to be frozen. The HDD-LED
| is always glowing, CPU is running with lowest frequency (633MHz).
|
| A frozen GUI appears reproducible (but not only) using image viewers
| as gqview or gthumb. Sometimes just opening those applications is
| enough for system freeze or running unison-gtk while gqview is
| opened (I don't do anything on my laptop, only unison-gtk is
| working---GUI freezes ...) or fast image alternation. Whereas "fast"
| means < 7 seconds. Then I have to kill X via `Ctrl Alt Backspace',
| kill gqview remotely if possible (after that everything's ok again)
| or I just wait for about 5--75 minutes until the GUI "wakes up"
| again. But then some applications are closed or crashed. Especially
| Mozilla is always gone after the "wake up".
|
| I never observed such instability on the same hardware with Debian
| Woody and Sarge and I still don't do with Knoppix (from CD-ROM), so
| I don't think that there's a hardware defect (BTW: Booting the
| Knoppix live CD with *no* configuration file takes 1 min 20 sec,
| booting Breezy from HDD takes 1 min 10 sec). Can anybody help me to
| find out what's going wrong on my laptop? I'd really like to fix it
| because at the moment my laptop is nearly unusable.
|
| Hardware:
| ---------
| CPU: Athlon XP 2200+ M
| RAM: 256MB (checked with memtest86+ in the last 30 hours)
| Graphics: S3 ProSavage8 KM266/KL266 (Xorg driver "savage")
| Chipset: VIA Apollo Pro266 AGP (memtest86+ writes "VIA KN266")
|
| Kernel: 2.6.12-10-k7
|
| Any help appreciated!
|
| Best regards,
| 	Christoph

What kind of laptop are you using?  See if it's listed here:

http://www.linux-laptop.net/

You didn't use the laptop very much when you had Hoary installed, but it
sounds like the problems you're getting now are bad enough that you
would likely have noticed them if they were there with Hoary.

What do you get on 'top' when run in a terminal?  Any process using up
more resources than it should?

Ed
- --
Ed Fletcher
ed at fletcher.ca

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless,
whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism
or the holy name of liberty or democracy?  -  Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

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