Hi,
Maybe this question has been asked already many times..sorry if I were not able to find the right thread. Me is a linux newbie.
I recently tested several distros to find out what suits best to me(RH9, Fedora, Suse and Mandrake 10). I liked the MDK most and so I am sticking with it. But there is a problem I am having. After some hours of work my sys completly freezes. It just freezes...sound is freezing and repeating short buffer plus I have noticed that HDD led stays on at that moment and wont go off. Only way out from it is a reset.
I am using:
Mandrake 10
P4 2.6 HT
Abit IS7-E i865 mobo
Creative Live! 5.1 sound card(ALSA)
Sapphire ati Radeon 9600pro
default kernel 2.6.3.4..also tried smp and enterprise kernels but they acted same way.
I have no idea what is causing that..maybe some kind of common known bug with especcialy that platform?
Any ideas greatly appreciated

Probably nothing freezes a Linux system more than X. My guess would be that during each and every of these lockups X was running. I had a similar issue with my laptop and a "ATI Radeon Mobility M6" video card.

To resolve this issue I commented out:
Load "dri"
in my XF86Config-4 file.

This is a really tough question to answer since there are so many possible causes, but with that said in my 5+ years experience with Linux only X problems have caused this sort of behavior. Once with a buggy version of "xawtv" which needed to be upgraded, then a Number 9 video card to support an SGI Flat-panel display which would always lockup, and of coarse most recently with the issue above.

Hmm...thats what I was suspecting too...plus most of the lockups happened directly while I was running maya. But if I disable DRI..this basically means that I will loose hardware accelerated OGL functionality..no?
Some time ago I found out that ATI and Linux just dont fit together very well. I am in a process of getting a decent nvidia card right now but would like to find out what is the problem anyway..if nothing else then just out of curiosity.

> But if I disable DRI..this basically means that I will loose hardware accelerated OGL
> functionality..no?

This is true, but unless your playing a lot of games you shouldn't notice a difference however, maya looks like it uses OpenGL, so I understand your point.

It appears your system crashes on you at least once a day. If you comment out DRI support and your system still locks up then at least you can rule this out has an issue.

If you are using a lot of OpenGL applications I would suggest using Accelerated-X over XFree86. It will cost some money (under $50, as much as a PC game) but their OpenGL implementation and graphics driver are more mature and updated more often, plus you can call someone on problems like this.

I used Accelerated-X to fix my Number 9 card problem (Accelerated-X had a better driver).

I had the same lockups in KDE and Mandrake 10, with an ATI card.
Rolling back to Mandrake 10 CE cleared this problem - no more lockups.

Same problems here.... MDK10CE, AthlonXP 1800+, NVidia GeForce card, latest 2.6.3-9mdk kernel. Seems to blow its mind when I try to transfer files across the network (NFS, Samba, or FTP). This very same hardware has run RedHat, SuSE and Debian without a hitch. Beginning to wonder about Mandrake. Aside from this obvious lack of stability, I really like the rest of the distro.

Ok..I changed my ATI card to NVIDIA card and all problems are gone...system runs super fine. It is not only that ATI was causing system stability in X environment...but Nvidia is much much faster too and overall compatiblity is way much better. Guess it is a minimum requirment if you want to have a stable linux box...nvidia is the way to go if you want fast and stable hardware accelerated open gl.