Feisty: recent updates causing freezes ??

[Vincent Trouilliez]

> Brian Fahrlander brian at fahrlander.net

> How "locked" are you?

A hard lock, as locked as a computer can be ! ;-)
Mouse pointer and whole screen frozen, no sign of activity whatsoever,
no reaction to any user input, can't switch to a VT, can't restart X
with alt+ctrl+BS.... in other word... "locked" ;-)
I don't have a second computer so I don't know if it might still react
to a network connection attempt, though I think for this to work a
server of some sort must be set-up and running, and I think (?) none is
available on a default Ubuntu install, no SSH or anything that would
let one connect to his machine. A shame though... maybe this no-open
port policy could be relaxed a bit to give people out of the box remote
access to their machine (which then could be also used for debugging as
is the case here ;-), as I don't think networking stuff in general is
reserved to geeks anymore.. networking is part of computing in
general now, with internet, broadband using Ethernet cards, wifi,
sharing printers and files between home computers, accessing his
machine remotely to get files when you are away from home, whatever.
Might be worth a spec for Gutsy+1 ...

> A complete lock, losing the mouse and everything,

That's it :-)

> it's usually RAM.  Run memtest at boot overnight to look
for it.

Will do. Though in the past I have had dozens of hard locks, they were
all caused by crappy video drivers (ATI 3D proprietary drivers for the
Radeon 9250).

Looking at Synaptic's history as someone suggested, it appears
something video related (mesa) got updated recently. I will force the
previous version and see if that improves things...
I don't think my problems are due to sleep modes or other such things,
as I always keep all such features turned off.
Upon rebooting from the crashes I experienced, I noticed problems with
one of my hard drives, which scared the hell out of me. Hard to say if
the drive caused the crash, or if the crash upset the drive... could be
either way I think. I will revert mesa to the previous version and see
what happens. If the crashes and drive problems remain, then I guess I
either need a new drive, or ribbon cable, or motherboard, since the IDE
controller is on-board...
Luckily my motherboard is very old (nForce2 chipset), so a
replacement one from ebay should cost little money... 


Thanks to all who replied,


Regards,

--
Vince