Ubuntu getting locked up

[Chuck Kuecker]

NoOp wrote:
> On 03/24/2010 07:44 PM, Chuck Kuecker wrote:
>   
>> Just wanted to let everyone know the final outcome on this problem. I 
>> removed the screensaver packages completely, and the problem went away.
>>
>> Did some more research. I was running an ATI Radeon X 800XL video card 
>> that my son had in the machine for his games. Turns out this card is no 
>> longer supported in Ubuntu 9.10.
>>     
>
> Cite please?
>   
I can't find the article I had last night, but did find this:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

Looking at that, I probably could have gotten the Radeon card to work, 
but as I don't need heavy duty graphics on my Ubuntu machine, I probably 
won't make the attempt.
That machine runs my web site and email server, so I don't bring it down 
except if forced to.
> I find this hard to imagine.. my old ATI cards work just fine in 9.10:
>
>            *-display
>                 description: VGA compatible controller
>                 product: Rage 128 Pro Ultra TF
>                 vendor: ATI Technologies Inc
> as an example. Note: I've older & they work find w/9.10 and 10.04.
>
>   
>> So, I pulled the video card out of my old Linux box, and put it in this 
>> one. Works fine. Reinstalled the screensaver packages, and set up the 
>> engine animation again - I just watched it switch over to the animation, 
>> which ran at the correct speed, and the machine recovered with mouse 
>> movement. No evidence of anything locking up.
>>     
>
> Perhaps you just needed to clean out the bad card seatings/connections
> in the system. You'd be surprised how time, temp, dust, et al takes it's
> toll on a machine. Simply pulling the card & reinstalling into that, or
> another system may have wiggled a connection on the card to sort things
> out. That said; screensavers are notorious for locking/crapping out
> systems. I recall in the edgy/gutsy days where some screensavers would
> lock my system just on test. I suspect that the same buggy screensavers
> are still there, I've just elected to skip any/all of them & let the
> screen go dark when it times out.
>
>   
>> The only unresolved question is - why did it work for a couple of weeks 
>> after I upgraded to 9.10, before starting to act up? It's almost like 
>> the card had a memory of how long it had run, and when it reached a 
>> certain time, it went nuts.
>>     
>
> Perhaps you weren't running the same applications at the same time?
>   
Hard to say. I am developing embedded Linux on that machine for a 
Freescale processor, so was running their build script. I think the 
major change was the upgrade to 9.10. The article I found - still 
looking! - said that video drivers changed between 9.04 and 9.10, and 
there was a list of ATI cards that were supported. The 800 was not in 
that list.

Found the article I used to determine this card was not supported:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/New-ATI-Video-Driver-Fixes-Ubuntu-Issues-114474.shtml
The referred PDF file has the list of supported cards.

The card I have in there now came out of my old Mandrake Linux machine, 
which I used for email and web site hosting for years. When I moved, and 
lost my high-speed DSL link, I had to go with a satellite service that 
would not support me hosting my own services, so the Linux box got set 
aside. When I got a high-speed wireless link set up back in 2007, I 
brought it back up and used it until the hard drive died. Mandrake had 
gone away, so I tried to install Ubuntu, and found problems with that 
hardware. My son had this box I am now using for his gaming, and had 
gotten a hotter machine, so had this sitting - I appropriated it and got 
Ubuntu running -  8.04 at first. That ran well until  the upgrade to 
9.10, when the video problems started.

Right now, with the older Rage 128 I have in it now, it's running those 
same screen savers just fine. I'm not fooling with success, but perhaps 
if I upgrade the hardware, i will pull the Radeon card out again.

Chuck Kuecker