Lenovo G575+FC14+Hebrew+Evolution: solid freeze
 

Hello,

I recently bought my mom a Lenovo G575 and installed FC14 on it
(downloaded ISO image, burned to DVD, installed from it).
I enabled Hebrew and Russian languages in addition to English
and set all the menus to be in Hebrew.

When I started showing her how to start and use "evolution",
at some point the whole desktop froze solid: mouse cursor
stuck, no response to mouse movements, clicks, keyboard keys.
I have "gkrellm" monitors at the right side of the desktop
and I saw that their waves stopped updating too. So it looks
like a really solid freeze, a surprise I didn't expect on LINUX.
I had to totally turn off the laptop. After rebooting I attempted
again to start evolution and at some point, after few minutes of
normal operation (adding 2 contacts and starting a new e-mail,
with Hebrew keyboard layout selected) the desktop froze solid again.
Before I started the "evolution" I added two temperature sensors
in the "gkrellm" and the last indications before freeze were 50 deg C.
Is it OK or too high? On my home full tower case Phenom X4 with Asus
M3A79T deluxe the CPU temp. is 45 deg C and MB temp. is 37 deg C,
when it's mostly idle but that case has LOTS of fans.

After the second freeze I restarted again and this time opened
"evolution" and wrote a test e-mail while in English keyboard
layout. This time, it worked OK.

During the installation of FC14 on the laptop there was some selection
related to video driver but AFAIR I used the default setting as I
didn't have any knowledge to prefare one option over another.

What can cause a laptop to freeze solid in this way? Am I right
suspecting the video card+drivers or there are many other reasons
equally probable?

Assuming it's the video card+drivers, what can I do to fix this freeze?

TIA for any help,

I had the same problems with Lenovo G575. I've tested almost all known distros (usually I use Fedora), but only 3 of them run almost well on this laptop: 1) Scientific Linux 6.0, 2) Chakra 2011.04-r2, 3) ALTLinux 6.0.0_beta20110714. Unfortunately Scientific has bad support of usb-3g-modems, Chakra has no russian localization, and it is difficult to install Skype on ALT.

The most probable reason of "freezing" on the most recent distros (like ALT and Chakra) is not a videocard driver (!) but atl1c module (ethernet card driver). You need to blacklist this module adding (as root) this line "blacklist atl1c" without quotas to the "/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist" or "/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf" file depending on your distro. This line disabels the Atheros ethernet card but does not affect the wireless or mobile connections.

As for now this is the only solution I've found. I hope the situation will be changed with the next kernel release.
...And don't forget to install the latest 11.6 catalyst driver.
I hope this will be helpfull. Cheers.

Hey guyz,

double-post, but... I have fund a solution for this problem xD

Link: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...driver-885074/

have fun :d

Hello, hotte!
Do you mean, you have both wireless and wired card working?

I guess that doesn't matter; to get Ubuntu succesfully working on your system you will only need to enable "network boot" (which is an option to get access to your PC via other computers, btw) and set it as the first boot option in your BIOS, followed by your CD/USB-Stick/Hard drive. Is that what you have meant?

I've understood your trick with boot devices, but my question was about network ifaces. Does the wired iface of your laptop work well?

Both, my WLAN & and my wired-card work well