[Bug 293200] Re: (COMPIZ ???) Laptop with 8.10 crashes randomly CAPS lock flashes...

[J Wood]

Okay, so I had a bit of a breakthrough today.

The Problem
Like many of you, I've been getting some random lock-ups; kernel panic with a hard freeze I could only end with a hard reset. This seems had something to do with the wireless card, iwl3945 -- it really didn't like one of the networks at my university, and whenever I got on that network, it crushed my system.

I read in a number of places that in order to fix this, you needed to
install linux-backports-modules-intrepid. Okay, why not. But that
introduced the other problem; the hard freezes may have stopped, but it
broke wireless. No networks could be seen, and the module couldn't be
modprobed. Of course it fixed the problem -- how can the wireless card
bring down the system if it's broke?

Removing the backports fixed the wireless, but left the freeze problem.

The problem has persisted up to the most recent kernel, which jumped to
2.6.27-10-generic in my updates, skipping 2.6.27-9-generic.

The Fix
After some more research, I found some references to "proposed" as a possible culprit, although I couldn't find enough to tell me what they meant. So I experimented. I commented out the proposed repositories in my sources.list and did all the updates and autocleans..  

The first thing I noticed was that the 2.6.27-10-generic kernel was no
longer available, but the 2.6.27-9-generic was. I added the
2.6.27-9-generic kernel, made sure I had the backports installed, the
headers, restricted modules, all that stuff, and rebooted.

AND WIRELESS WAS THERE. AND IT WAS GOOD.

So far no freezes (although it's a U.S. holiday and I'm not on my
university's network), wireless is working fine, and everything seems
happy.  I ran this laptop for over 18 hours now without a problem.

So if you're having any hardware woes, consider commenting out the
intrepid-proposed lines, re-installing some things, and it may solve
some of your issues.

-- 
(COMPIZ ???) Laptop with 8.10 crashes randomly CAPS lock flashes...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/293200
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu.

-- 
ubuntu-bugs mailing list
ubuntu-bugs at lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs