Alienware laptop X input freezes, multiple distros/kernels

tja1618 · 08-04-2010, 07:30 AM

Hello all,

I am having a very frustrating problem with my old Alienware laptop (area51m 766).

After trying multiple distros, including older releases, the system in most cases has the input (mouse and keyboard) freeze up almost immediately. I first noticed the issue with the latest Ubuntu, and then Fedora. I tried earlier releases of Fedora up to 10, but the same thing happens. In fact with 10, I can't even get past the main account creation screen after installation.

I believe it is the x input freezing because with Ubuntu, when the input was frozen, I pressed my power button and the menu came up to gracefully shut down the system. When the system was booted, and the input froze, in some cases I got a gnome message referring to a crash in the package kernel.

I was finally able to install and use opensuse 11. I even compiled and booted some different kernels, including 2.6.35 with no issue. So I am quite stumped as to what is going on. I'll post more details later, but I'll include this link from another post of mine:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9652635

Has anyone got any ideas of what could be happening? The laptop works fine wiht opensuse 11 and Windows XP.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

business_kid · 08-04-2010, 09:24 AM

Talk to us about the video card. In the (bad old) early days the Si8S 6326 didn't respect the 16 modes that every other card had. Apparently 16 mopdes are the same on everything, so software writers could assume those but not on a SiS 6326. SiS have changed owners and much improved since then, I should add, and make respectable chips

tja1618 · 08-04-2010, 09:59 AM

It has an Nvidia Geforce 5700 GO video card. I used to run Linux on this laptop years ago without issue. That was about 2 years ago at least though, for a while I had some overheating issues (which I solved with some heat paste on the video card). Unfortunately this card wasn't very widely used, but with opensuse 11 I installed the nvidia driver and it seemed to run well.

-> As I am typing this I just got into the desktop finally with the "noapic" kernel parameter. This is the longest it has ran at this point. Now I am going to do some reading about this kernel parameter and see what it did. I noticed that other laptops needed this to boot. However, I am still not sure if it actually solved anything.

business_kid · 08-05-2010, 03:09 AM

Noapic disables the interrupt controller. Historically there were a few versions of this
XT: a single 8259 chip giving 8 hardware interrupts
AT: 2 8259 chips, with one fed into another. giving 15 usable irqs. Subsequently this became a few sq. mm. of an ASIC, and buses got clever so the bios could assign these. The trick was to get everything an irq it could believe in without landing 2 devices on the same irq, which locked the pc. They eventually got around these lockups.
LATER: the equivalent of 3x8259 chips and fancy bios implementations to allow interrupt sharing. Some of these failed miserably in the early days - notably Via, although there were others.

What noapic does is bring you back to AT standard. There's 16 interrupts, but you don't get back the hardware lockups, he 'clever' bios is told to go and play in the traffic, and you can run the box.

tja1618 · 08-05-2010, 07:25 AM

I really appreciate the insight - I am quite curious about this. Apparently there are quite a number of machines which need this parameter to run right.

I installed Fedora 13 and have been running fine ever since (using noapic since install).

Thanks for the replys!

fbsduser · 12-18-2010, 05:57 PM

Did you by any chance had the PC sent to be serviced recently, or updated it's BIOS recently? I had seen PC's displaying that same bizarre behavior after being serviced or had their BIOS's updated.
One such PC's is a Toshiba Satellite A205-S5804 my older sister tossed my way to get her copy of Fedora reinstalled. The specs are:

Code:

Processor and Chipset
• Intel Pentium Dual-Core processor T2330 1.60GHz, 1 MB L2, 533MHz FSB 
• Mobile Intel GL960 Express Chipset 
Memory
• Configured with 1024MB PC5300 DDR2 SDRAM (both memory slots may be occupied). Maximum capacity 2048MB.
Hard Disk Drive   
• 120GB (5400 RPM); Serial ATA hard disk drive 
Fixed Optical Disk Drive     
• Generic TSSTcorp DVD SuperMulti (+/-R double layer) drive supporting 11 formats Maximum speed and compatibility: CD-ROM (24x), CD-R (24x), 
CD-RW (16x), DVD-ROM (8x), DVD-R (Single Layer, (8x)), 
DVD-R (Double Layer, (4x)), DVD-RW (6x), DVD+R (Single 
Layer, (8x)), DVD+R (Double Layer, (4x)), DVD+RW (8x), DVDRAM (5x) 
Display  
• 15.4” diagonal widescreen TruBrite®TFT LCD display at 1280x800 
native resolution (WXGA) Native support for 720p content 
Graphics  
• Mobile Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 with 128MB-251MB 
dynamically allocated shared graphics memory 
Sound 
• Built-in stereo speakers  
• Sound Volume Control Dial 
Input Devices 
• 86 key US keyboard 
• TouchPad™ pointing device 
• TouchPad™ Enable/Disable ) 
Communications 
• Modem
• 10/100 Base-TX Ethernet 
• Integrated Wi-Fi
 compliant wireless: Realtek 802.11b/g wireless-LAN 
Expandability 
• 2 main memory slots.  Both slots may be occupied. 
• ExpressCard™ slot (ExpressCard/34 and ExpressCard/54) 
Ports 
• RGB (monitor) output 
• Headphone output 
• USB v2.0 – 2 ports 
• RJ-45 LAN 
• RJ-11 modem 
Physical Description 
• Dimensions (WxDxH Front/H Rear): 14.3” x 10.5” x 1.32” /1.55” without 
feet Weight: Starting at 6.0 lbs   depending upon configuration
LCD Cover Color: Black
Power 
• 75W (19V 3.95A) 100-240V/50-60Hz AC Adapter. Dimensions (WxDxH): 4.25” x 1.34” x 1.85”  Weight: starting at 0.67 lbs  
Battery  
• 6-cell 4000mAh Lithium Ion battery pack.

And like your Alienware, it is highly unstable on every linux distro I tried. Strangelly OpenSUSE and Windoze run perfectly stable on that craptop.

business_kid · 12-19-2010, 05:06 AM

As somebody who has spent more time than is goof for him peering into the abyss opf failing laptops, I can tell you there are a lot of Toshiba specific tweaks out there for various parts where they give difficulty.

fbsduser · 12-19-2010, 05:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by business_kid

As somebody who has spent more time than is goof for him peering into the abyss opf failing laptops, I can tell you there are a lot of Toshiba specific tweaks out there for various parts where they give difficulty.

The weird thing is tht *SUSE work OOTB while other distros won't (toshutils and toshset are installed).

business_kid · 12-20-2010, 04:45 AM

/Guess:

Most distro kernels try to accommodate all nasty tweaks, workarounds, and bugfixes, of which there are many.
It can get to the point that workaround+bugfix=bug

Someone in SuSE obviously owns a TOSH!

fbsduser · 01-12-2011, 11:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by business_kid

/Guess:

Most distro kernels try to accommodate all nasty tweaks, workarounds, and bugfixes, of which there are many.
It can get to the point that workaround+bugfix=bug

Someone in SuSE obviously owns a TOSH!

Or someone high up at M$ owns both SUSE and Toshiba.