[ubuntu-za] Lucid crashing badly

[Stefano Rivera]

Hi Gavin (2010.04.21_12:01:51_+0200)
> Cannot restart X, cannot ctl/alt+ F1/2/3 to get a shell either, the
> ONLY thing I can do is kill the power. Not cool at all. :-(

Have you tried sshing into your machine from another machine? The
symptoms you describe sound like a GPU hang. Chances are everything is
working fine except for the display.

Are you sure this isn't an overheating issue? Does it happen in Windows
(if you dual-boot). Does it happen if you use the VESA driver for X?

> 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 9488

The ATI graphics drivers seem to be relatively actively maintained in Ubuntu and if you
report the bug and work with them to help diagnose it, you should get
some resolution (although it can take a few months to get there).

Work your way through this documentation:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/Freeze
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Backtracing

See if you can see what's going on and get a bug report filed. Even
better, do any of these bugs look like your problem?:
http://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati

I've been having similar problems with my Intel 945gm (for a few years),
which seem to have mostly been resolved recently.

Yes, it takes some effort to produce a bug report that helps a developer
to find the problem, and you'll learn quite a bit in the process, but
it's very rewarding :)

> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/502433
> 
> Although no-one mentions anything about this bug crashing the entire
> system though, so my issue may be something else.

B43 is the Broadcom wireless driver. The b43 errors you see there are
completely unrelated to this problem.

SR

-- 
Stefano Rivera
  http://tumbleweed.org.za/
  H: +27 21 465 6908 C: +27 72 419 8559  UCT: x3127