Hi,
Long post, sorry. I'm trying to be as clear as possible, since this is pretty complicated and I've been wrestling with it for a good while now.
Back in Mandriva 2005LE I used to have this weird problem, my computer would just reboot itself without warning. It usually happened when using an opengl app, but not every time and not only with 3d games. I got it fixed by switching kernels to kernel-multimedia from cooker.
Now I'm running Mandriva 2006 and initially had no problems, but after a week or so I started noticing that after long hours of use some weird graphical glitches start appearing all over KDE. Widgets turn black, desktop background disappears, some parts of windows turn into whirls of colours and after a while the computer reboots.
At first I thought there must either be something overheating, or my memory is bad. After testing in windows with premiere, photoshop, games, as well as memtest86+ I found nothing. Everything works perfectly in windows, no crashes, no reboots. (Well macromedia's software crashes a lot, but that's normal from them)
Then I thought of switching away from KDE. I have now tried IceWM, Gnome and xfce, and still have reboots. The garbled screen only appears in Gnome and KDE, though.
I have also ruled out Azureus as the culprit, it was also an early suspect since I have it running almost all the time. Though it would seem that rebooting is more likely when Azureus has been running for a long time (+6h), but it still reboots even if I haven't turned it on at all.
A while ago I installed Kubuntu 5.10. After only an hour of using it with KDE, the screen was garbled. Widgets turned purple and black, background disappeared, text areas turned into purple and green swirls, but
it did not reboot! If I killed X, screen was fine again for a while, then it was trashed again. I had not installed any new packages, it was vanilla kubuntu 5.10.
I couldn't figure out how to add apt-repositories to install fluxbox or some other WM with a screen that's only usable ten minutes at a time, so I went back and installed Mandriva 2006 without KDE or Gnome.
Now here's the part I can't figure out. It only reboots
sometimes when some of the following happens, and
only then.
*Switching from a virtual desktop to another.
*Start playing any video.
*Unpause video playback.
*Press "cancel" in Kaffeine's or Totem's file selector.
Also sometimes reboots or segfaults when there's a whole lot going on in Doom3, Quake4 or UT2004, but this seems to be just a problem with those games, since it's pretty common.
I have tried various kernel-multimedias in MDV 2006, they had no effect. I have also tried various versions of NVIDIA's drivers. Also I have tried using Nvidia's nforce drivers for my integrated sound. No effect. Have tried upgrading x.org from here:
http://seerofsouls.com/rpm2006.html, as instructed in the mandriva club forum, but it had no effect.
Also it does not matter if I'm running with nv or nvidia driver, still reboots.
The kernel I'm using is 2.6.12-12mdk, NVIDIA is at 7676. (Kubuntu 5.10 also has 2.6.12)
Other specs: AMD a64 3000+, nforce 4, Geforce 6600GT.
I'm thinking of downgrading maybe to 2.6.6, but that would probably meant compiling it myself (this would introduce new possibilities for errors), since I can't find any prebuilt ones. Other than that, I'm out of ideas already, so any help would be greatly appreciated.
Edit:
Oh, and ACPI/APIC are both off. Probably were not in kubuntu, though.
Also sometimes had reboots with Amarok when changing songs.
Thus my new favourite culprit now would be the sound drivers. I'll try finding a different sound card for testing, but it might take a while.
