Wow, that describes EXACTLY what happens to me.. It freezes, but not really.. CPU hits 100%, and pounding keys on the keyboard does nothing.. HOWEVER, If I press the power button once (not holding), it will kick through the power down sequence, temporarily unfreezing things.. for a couple seconds.. sometimes I can even move the mouse and change desktops, click applications, however, the keyboard does NOT function, and most applications are mostly hung. Using the system bar at the bottom of course does not work. I haven't tried SSHing into it because I use the builtin wireless and my wireless router blocks all requests from my other subnet.

I am using a Fujitsu Lifebook N5010, which has the following specs:
P4 3.0ghz cpu (w/ hyperthreading)
768MB ram
Some toshiba 60gb hd (very very slow drive, compared to todays standards.. quite sad in this package..)
ATI mobile 64mb graphics card/chip/whatever
I noticed it had some SiS chipset stuff on it, though I dont really know which pieces at the moment.. Finding out the exact components on this machine has been a great pain in the neck..
If there's a command I can run to get a sysinfo dump, let me know and I can get the results from that

So, it's definitely NOT isolated to the nvidia chipset, because I am definitely having the same problem

If it's any help, it seems that it's more likely to freeze with a lot of HD activity, eg, if I'm FTPing files or the like, with a lot of disk IO, it has a high frequency of freezing.. Or so it seems..


Oddly, I tried installing Mandrake 10 earlier, and was getting some hda: lost interrupt errors, and it would never hit the install proc.. I did some researching, and used> linux noapic and it fired right up, but instead of installing, I rebooted back into SuSE with this boot option, and it still hung anyway.. So that's not it in my case..

I am praying to the linux gods for help on this, because I really don't want to go back to windows..

In the meantime, once my son gets done watching a video on my laptop, I'm going to try installing Mandrake 10 and see what I can see..

It seems we have similar systems.
1) Video Card NVIDIA FX5200 -128M AGP
2) AMD XP3000+ Processor
3) Chipset KT600 and VT8237
Onboard LAN VT6102 Rhine II
Motherboard is an MSI KT6V

zenarcher

Well, I tried Mandrake 10.. It installs amazingly easy and fast.. <10 minutes and I was up and.. er.. running?

It doesnt detect or support my wireless (built in) out of the box. Very discouraging.. I don't really feel like messing with installing some non-distributed software just to get it to work, when it worked out of the box with SuSE 9.1

Think I will try reinstalling SuSE 9.1.. Again, and just keep messing with it.. I never did a recompile of the kernel like I planned, so perhaps that may help..

Well, I'm glad you have a bit of an opportunity to experiment around. Too bad your ethernet is not detected. As I understand, the free copy of Mandrake does not have all the programs, possibly some of the drivers and so forth, which are on the copy you can purchase. Possibly the driver is on that set. You might also check the supported hardware list on the Mandrake website...I had a printer that wasn't supported....so traded out with the HP T45 my wife was using..and put my Windows only printer on her system. Problem solved.

zenarcher

Well, I have a wired port on it also, of course, but it's just irritating that it's not recognized, at all, by Mandrake..

Perhaps the network install is smarter, I'm not sure, but I'm guessing not. I saw other posts on here from people with Atheros wireless cards that expressed disdain over it not being auto detected.

I am reinstalling SuSE 9.1 over the network now, actually Usually goes pretty darn quick, <30 minutes for the install.

After all the researching I've done, it looks like the bug is in fact a serious bug not with distributions, but with XFree86 or KDE. Seems the common denominator is always those conditions. If you check out some posts on the FreeBSD groups, you'll see some similiar reports of this freezeup.. Coincidence?

One person even responded with "you picked a bad time to use -current"..

Here's to hoping that is the case, and it's fixed soon.

How has your system been so far? Still rock solid? Have you tried any I/O intensive applications yet?

Well, that is interesting about the bug and all of the people with the problem. Perhaps with so many people having the issue will motivate someone to correct it. I know that SuSe has a means of allowing my Sony PDA (S-360) to sync, although I couldn't get it to work, either. Mandrake does not, at least in the downloadable edition. I'm assuming somewhere along the way I'll find a way to do that. Otherwise, everything continues to work perfectly. I removed the unsupported Lexmark printer and installed the supported HP printer and it is working great. I haven't tried any really demanding I/O programs yet...however I have tried to rapidly change websites, while browsing, which really caused SuSE to freeze...and no problem. I've done some downloading and transferring from my CD backup and no problems. I've not had the slightest indication of hesitation or delay in any application I've used. I think this one is going to work fine. As I say, the same issue occurred when I installed Mandrake 8.2, which is the older version, so I don't know what to say about that one. I just know the Mandrake 10 is doing everything I could expect.

zenarcher

Well that's cool, definitely keep me updated if you can. I'd really like to solve this riddle.. If I absolutely cannot get SuSE to work a bit more solid, then I'll probably give it a try (after more preparations to download stuff that doesnt work out of box).

I am using 9.1 successfully (I know you don't need to hear that). I've installed 9.1 on Toshiba Centrino based laptop, AMD64 desktop and an Duron desktop. The problems I've experienced have all been with the Toshiba but none as bad as you describe. I have done 32 and 64 bit installs on the AMD64 and upgrade (from 9.0) and new installs on the Duron.

1. Keyboard Freeze

The only problem I have had is with the Toshiba. I've experienced freezes during install and freezes during operation. The freezes during install essentially were no keyboard response. The operational freezes are keyboard freezes. Hitting keys at random does not free it BUT hitting Ctrl + Shift + F2 does and then it works fine. The freezes I have seen occur during typing only. There is a fix on the SuSE site which drops the hardware interval clock timer rate to 100 ticks from 1K ticks.

2. Network Freeze

I have power management enabled which works great EXCEPT! When I unplug the ethernet from the building network and wait longer than a few minutes the system freezes, it is responsive to key strokes Crtl Alt F1 gets me to a command prompt but can do nothing their either. Ctrl Alt Delete is set to reboot and that works. The issue there is the same on Microsoft had/has with suspend/resume in Win2K and WinXP, the ethernet driver does not properly obey the ACPI spec. The trick to make it behave perfectly is the same trick on Windows, stop the network first. (ifdown eth0 - for example)

3. CPU Chip Behaviour

SuSE 9.1 introduces better ACPI, better but not perfect. Earlier versions of Linux would not speed step and the CPU's would run much hotter. I've not seen any problems as a result however if you have a component that is thermally sensitive - example the internal WiFi Lan Card in some notebooks, to a failing CPU fan at the other extreme you may experience hangs as a result from thermal slew rates.

My wife is a complete Linux Newbie and needed a high end graphics tool. She is happily using SuSE 9.1 on the Duron using GIMP.

I'll re-read the thread but, from my experience, I've had problems on certain linux distros (Lindows, Debian) and not on others (SuSE, Gentoo). Sometimes Windows does better on flaky hardware, sometimes Linux does. As long as the hardware is reasonable I have not had a problem with Linux.

cheers ted

njaguar,

Just checked your config and noted the use of wireless. Have you tried disabling the wireless and using it hardwired?

I note it's not Centrino - good - cos that's flaky even on 9.1. (I use an orinoco pcmcia plugin with no problems)

I'll check the other forums 'cos I think I may have seen a keyboard freeze thread in my wanderings on that box.

Finally that's a hot cpu chip, does the power management start up OK? There is a bug in SuSE during startup where they
load bits of one power management and bits of another and you get this message about starting powersaved but it
won't 'cos you have cpufreqd running etc.

ted

Yes, the remove "desktop" from grub trick.. No effect.

Interesting! Does this affect wireless? If yes, that MAY be the problem. My wireless has a tendancy to just randomly drop off from time to time..

Yeah, it does run pretty hot, moreso than under windows.. This was one of my biggest gripes, in fact, was that linux seemed to be running all the time, keeping my cpu at an above average temperature.. When I close the lid with nothing but gkrellm running, (or nothing for that matter), it shouldn't be using enough cpu to kick the cpu fans on, but they run (low speed) almost non stop... I have the screensaver disabled (blank screen), so it's not that... How do I check my logs to see if there's a problem during post as you mentioned? Fixing this alone would make me EXTREMELY happy, as this thing does run hot when in use, but I'm tired of it running hot just cause linux is idle happy..

Have not.. Since I reinstalled, I haven't had a single freeze.. However, two things are different, first, I set my wireless router to DMZ (it's a horrible horrible router.. stupid belkin) to solve some problems I was having (most all services worked, EXCEPT web! Very odd..) Also, when I was getting the crashes, it was almost ALWAYS doing something cpu/hdd intensive, eg, running a bittorrent program. I haven't reinstalled this program again, and it hasn't yet frozen either.. However, again, I had the same freeze by simply ftping to a local box and copying lots of files around.. But last night I did some of that, no freeze there... So I'm at a loss on that...

I actually had some cheeky problems with Windows on this machine, though not at all related to what I'm having under linux.. Under windows, the HD would go nuts, accessing 100% like a floppy drive, bringing the system to it's knees.. I don't know if this was related to some garbage auto update SP2 crap or not, but it made me so mad I removed Windows, and haven't put it back on since... I've never experienced any problems like that under SuSE thus far... I'm 99% sure it's not a faulty hardware problem, because far too many other people have reported this same issue for it to be caused by faulty hardware.. It seems most people give up completely and resort to going back to Windows, from most of the threads I've read...

(Posting from my laptop)..

I see no error messages in dmesg regarding any power problems... Here's the top lines regarding ACPI tho:
Wierd that it's using some APIC stuff even though I told it noapic.. Setting acpi=off renders the machine to not boot at all (tried this before).. Fun

Still no crashes yet.. Haven't tried using any BitTorrent applications yet either though.. Perhaps the overload of continuous I/O usage from these applications is the real culprit? But again, why? I always considered linux to be extremely stable, it certainly shouldn't be crashing during heavy load, or whatever is caused by using an application like BitTorrent..

As I promised, here's some more information.
I'm pretty sure now my freezing up problem is due to problems with accelerated AGP use.

I entered:
Option "NvAGP" "0"
into my XF86Config file and experienced no freezing that evening.

Enemy Territory ran noticably slower with a much lower fps rate but without freezing up.

I then tried to prevent agpgart and via_agp modules from loading at boot and was only able to do this by renaming the modules. WHERE DO THESE THINGS GET LOADED AT BOOT?
I checked modules.conf, modprobe.conf and even tried blacklisting the modules in /etc/hotplug/blacklist. Only renaming them prevented loading.

I then changed the Nvidia driver to use Nvidia AGP by setting:
Option "NvAGP" "1"
in my /etc/X11/XF86Config file.

The Nvidia driver fired up its AGP (as verified by looking at /proc/drivers/nvidia/agp/status).

Enemy Territory caused the desktop to freeze almost immediately.

Just as a fluke, I tried changing the default color depth in XF86Config to 24bpp.
I normally run at 16bpp.

I restarted X and fired up the game again.

It ran for several hours with only brief periods of freezing and my frame rate was back up again.

Tonite I'm going to try reloading the apgart and via_agp modules and setting the nvidia driver to use these (Option "NvAGP" "2") with 24bpp color depth to see what happens.

Another thing I should mention is that Nvidia's documents on it's Linux driver mention that mother boards based on the VIA chipset have adjustable AGP drive levels and there is a range of settings that work best with Nvidia cards.

I'm going to try playing with the AGP drive level setting in BIOS over the weekend to see if that helps.

Maybe what I've tried so far can help someone out there. Let me know if it does.
I'm going to report back after I make the changes I mentioned.


Good Luck,

YeeHaa4LINUX

Interesting, except in my case, I'm using ATi. However, the supplementary guide DID mention that ONLY 24bit is supported. I also changed my resolution to this (have not installed the supplementary drivers) and I had zero problems with Cedega running Diablo II (which I did on my previous install).

So far, no freezes yet.. About 35 hours and counting.. I still haven't used any BitTorrent applications, however, so perhaps it was just THEM that was the problem, as I mentioned before..

Maybe someday X will be as solid as the rest of linux, even with crappy video drivers.

Ok,

I've tried EVERYTHING I could find and my system still freezes (see previos postings).

Even with the NvAGP option set to zero, eventually the desktop freezes.

I've messed with everything from mother board settings to XF86Config to acpi, apic and many other kernel options.
I still get the freezing problem.

The only thing that works.......... using the nv driver instead of the nvidia driver.

The nv driver works problem free but without 3D acceleration that I need !!!!

Here's my final options:

1 - Reinstall the latest driver from Nvidia's website one more time. If this works, I'll need to rebuild the driver everytime the kernel gets updated.

2 - Try another Linux distro. I have Fedore Core 2, Mandrake 10, Debian (various) and others.
Maybe this will make a difference.

3 - Replace my Nvidia based PNY GeForce 4 MX 420 AGP card with an ATI 9200 card.
ATI cards up to the 9200 have native Linux drivers that will do 3D. Cards above this need ATI's drivers which I hear are not too good.


I'll let you know how it turns out,

YeeHaa