NVIDIA Question

[Bart Silverstrim]

Please let there be some other users on the list that use the NVIDIA 
GeForce 8600 series...device 0402?

That's what I'm running in my Ubuntu system.  Very recently I've noticed 
more lockups that usual...but I don't know if it's because of recent 
updates or something I was doing.

Okay, I was trying to get Truecrypt running.  Following a HOWTO example, 
I tried formatting a 70 gig file mounted under truecrypt as an ext3 
filesystem.  Twice it locked up X tight when nearly halfway through the 
format.  Coincidence?  Maybe.  Seemed pretty reproducible.  Don't do the 
format of the 70 gig file, it didn't lock up.  Ooookay.

Got the system running, checked with fsck (sudo touch /forcefsck, 
reboot).  Things seemed happy.  Went to bed as the 3ware card finished 
"initilizing" from the forced restart.  System log seemed fine.  Etc.

During the day today, I was able to connect to my system remotely 
through ssh tunnel to run OOCalc.  Updated some tables, synced the data 
to my external USB drives.  No problems.

Came home, still nothing out of the ordinary.  The system had the 
desktop locked (as in a password), and the screensaver had been running 
last night and then the display went to sleep as it always did after 
inactivity.  This was the state it was in when I left for work this 
morning, it would have been like this when I logged in from work 
remotely.  Nothing out of the ordinary...

I moved the mouse. Nothing.  No password prompt.  Uh-oh.

Pulled a Macbook out of my bag, tried pinging the internal address. 
Nothing.  Control-alt-backspace.  Nothing.  The system just sat there, 
screen dark, fans whirring as usual.  Hit the reset button.  Came back 
online.

I downloaded the latest video drivers after that, upgrading from .11 to 
.19 from the NVIDIA site.  I'm pushing the system as best I can by 
allocating 1.7 gig RAM to a VMWare virtual machine (also running Ubuntu 
7.04) out of my system's 2 gig and doing updates, along with a couple 
tar jobs and md5sums of large files to try stressing it a little with 
memory and drive use.  The 3ware 3dm2 is reporting no errors with the 
drives.  System logs don't seem to show anything.  The only thing I know 
I've run into problems before with is the NVIDIA 8600 card being buggy 
with the enhanced desktop enabled.

Now...have other people out there with the 8600 had lockup problems 
sporadically occur with the Ubuntu enhanced desktop enabled?