Feedback on xvideo-xorg-driver-intel wanted

[David Fox]

The reason I'm basically posting here is because lately I've had way
too many freezes on my system, to the point of it being unusable for
production work.

Sometimes I can't get through a firefox session without the system
needing a three-finger salurte (only the finger positons have been
changed to protect the innocent) to help it reset to a clean slate so
I don't fry the filesystem or something (so far ext3 has been robust
as all hell).

Here's basically what I have - a put-together model from mwave (fairly
decent overall) with a Q6600 cpu, 4 gigs of RAM, and the motherboard
is an asus P5QL-EM motherboard, which supports an onboard Inetl video
chip (Q33 or some such) that does the video, which is onboard.

lspci spits

0:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset Integrat
ed Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset Integrated Grap
hics Controller (rev 03)

I'm using Jaunty, everything up to date. It goes without saying that
Jaunty is much better overall than Intrepid was as far as the intel
video drivers, generallyt.

But now onto my real problem.

Even while running Jaunty early on, my machine would seize up every so
often -usually it would be more than a few days between
reboots/resets, and I could live with that, after all I get back to
where I left off (if I don't lose work) in a few seconds. So I lived
with it, figuring that the intel video drivers would get better, and I
wouldn't have to slip in an nvidia card if it wasn't necessary.

But lately, it freezes up many times a day, sometimes when doing
something as simple as reading email (firefox) or watching a movie, or
something else. (Historically, this system has remained up 24/7
running folding @ home because I have the "oomph" - it's certainly
fast enough to do anything for me.)

The change - I inherited a beautiful 21" CRT monitor (Panasonic Pro
P110i) which is just awesome. I can do (with a bit of googling and
judicious editing of the Xorg config file) 1920x1440. That's my
preferred resolution now.

Before it was something like 1352x864 or something, and that was using
a rather nice Viewsonic (E90) but that monitor went south. Of course,
that is the crux of the problem, which is way too many freezes if I
run at the newer resolution.


Anyhow, here's what I'm asking for - basic advice as to what the next
step should be. Going by experience, I could a) slap in a new video
card, but I don't have the budget for that. I would like the ability
to play high def video here with vlc/mplayer/whatever without having
it be too slow, and I imagine that the onboard video chip itself isn't
capable of doing what I want, or there's too much load on the CPU or
system bus.

Or, I could bite the bullet, and upgrade-manager -d this thing to
Karmic right now. I am running Jaunty, and I have karmic on the
laptop. I upgraded early on to Jaunty (about February) mostly to solve
an insurmountable issue with OpenGL and some applications not being
usable. Much of that is gone in Jaunty. On the other hand this is a
mostly production box. Of course I can't afford much if any downtime,
but this would be an acceptable solution if it fixes the video issue.
My question here is whether or not anyone else has experienced this
"Freezing" issue. Personally if Nvidia is the better option, I could
plug in my spare borrowed 6200 chip which is only marginally better
than the 6100 something I had on a now-defunct dual core AMD (died
because of power supply and heating issues) system. And I had really
no problems with that, once I found what the right driver was (173.12
something or other - maybe even 180.xx I can't remember, and that was
Hardy at the time.)

Or, I could continue to wait, until EOM and do the update like
everyone else. Probably that would work. The only dependency here is
getting new builds of amarok-nightly from the PPA repositories and not
having that updated until sometime after Karmic goes live. I got
around that issue before with a little difficulty.

At this point, the third option is the least desirable because nothing
else will change.

In the past, I've gone around this issue (new drivers etc) by running
mixed testing / unstable on Debian, and only grabbing the things that
the intel video driver depends on and not bothering to wait if it ever
comes into testing per se. I get the idea that doing this way on
Ubuntu is not going to work.

So, I'm just asking if others have experienced similar issues to mine
and what you think the best roadmap for me would be now. I'm running
Karmic now on the laptop (have been for sometime) and I still get some
random lockups, but only with a specific application (stellarium, from
SVN) and it's getting better all the time, but we have to deal with
all the other changes trying to go in at the same time.



-- 
thanks for letting me change the magnetic patterns on your hard disk.