more lockup laptop problems with dapper

[Eric S. Johansson]

Marius Gedminas wrote:
> I am very grateful to X developers that wrote the open-source radeon
> driver.  But it does cause occasional total crashes on my laptop (sometimes
> three times a day, more often once per month).  Bugs happen, and then they
> get fixed (hopefully).
> 
> Marius Gedminas

thank you Marius.  I unfortunately I'm one of these people who get 
lockups about every three to five minutes.  A kind person that I am 
grateful to have sent me a list of things to try and I will experiment 
with them probably this weekend so that we can build a set of possible 
recovery techniques.

I think the variability in our responses to various drivers is an 
artifact of the total lack of transparency in PC hardware specifications 
and the use of proprietary tweaks to hardware as a way of increasing 
intellectual property protection for the individual chip.  Classic 
example has been compression algorithms for CCD and CMOS Web cameras.

Using a proprietary compression scheme you can increase your 
intellectual property for the entire chipset.  The same is probably 
happening with every other piece of hardware we need to deal with.

blech.