686 freezes more than 386?

[Matthias Heiler]

Charles Malespin <charles.malespin at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi all, I just switched to the 686 2.6.10-5 kernel because I have 1Gb
> ram and I was told to use that kernel for that much ram(right?).  I used
> to have freezes pretty often with the 386 kernel, and went through a
> bunch of trial and error ways to try and find a solution but couldnt.
> Well now with this 686 kernel the freezes seem to be happening more
> often and sometimes after just 10 min of booting up, and for no reason.
> I am using an ATI X300 video card btw.  

I also experienced frequent freezes and also have an ATI (mobile) X300
card (inside a Dell D610 Latitude notebook which contains other rather
recent hardware).

Someone here suggested to disable hardware rendering (take out glx and
the dri statements from /etc/X11/xorg.conf).  That's what I try right
now.  I don't run this configuration long enough to be able to say if
it helps or not.

What definitely helped was to manually upgrade to kernel 2.6.12-1 from
breezy (download the necessary deb-packages (it's just the linux-image
and one or two support packages) from hand and install with "dpkg -i
packagename").  Also I added the kernel parameters "idle=halt
pci=bios" in /boot/grub/menu.lst.  This made my system usable.

Note that upgrading to stuff from breezy is not recommended by some
ubuntu developers.  However, it may be the only chance to get the
system run acceptably stable (though not very stable).

Good luck,

  Matthias

PS: If you get your system to work I'd appreciate to hear about (just
post a message here or reply to the e-mail address).