Hi,

I'm having a similar problem to that described above: after no trouble with Mandriva 2005LE, I upgraded to 2006 PowerPack and now get random freezes :-(

My video card is an ATI Radeon 9000 PRO and I'm using the fglrx driver. In my quest to fix this I've upgraded to Xorg 6.9 and the latest fglrx driver (the pain!) and having read this thread I've tried using the VESA driver, which locks up solid as soon as I try to test it.

Sometimes I can go for days without a crash, and at other times it happens every five minutes.

Any help appreciated!

Jim Gillespie

Notice in here most mention upgrade to 2006
If thats what you really mean ,I had a bit of trouble with the upgrade and ended up getting it fixed by doing a full install and not formatting my user partition. took 1/2 hour as opposed to 2 hours for the upgrade

If I read this correctly, you upgraded? I would look into the videocard situation first, but if your video was working before and not now, I would suspect either 2006 does not support your card....OR....In theory, all dependency versions should be "resolved" during an upgrade, but personal experience leads me to believe otherwise and if you search around you may read of others with similar problems with upgrading. Most documentation on this subject suggests a fresh install.

good luck

Yep, you can't ever go wrong for going with a fresh install when changing to a new version of an OS. Just don't format your /home partition and you won't have to do much tinkering, except to install some of your own packages you like.

Thanks for the answers everyone.

In addition to not formatting /home, I also discovered that it's a good idea to mount /usr/local on its own partition, especially if you've put some of your own homegrown perl scripts there....

In fact, I did end up doing a clean install of 2006 (during my initial setup, not recently), and then I still had to install a later Xorg package before the video card would work. I've since installed the latest Mandriva update to Xorg (which again broke the video display and I had to spend a lot of time with lynx before I got the latest fglrx driver and did a bit of manual fiddling).

I'm still getting apparently random freezes. I tried switching from KDE to Gnome, and still got them.

If you are having problems with xorg and are using ATI, then it seems like a bug with the latest xorg releases. I have noticed other people using different distros having problems with ATI in xorg 6.9 and 7.0. If you are brave , you could try MDE xorg rpms. I use them on Mandriva 2006 but with an nvidia based card.

this might be a shot in the dark but when i upgraded my desktop from le2k5 to 2006 i went straight to easyurpmi.org. i set that up then as root urpmi -auto-select

I was surprised that i had to upgrade 417 packages. this might be a fix. couldnt hurt to try. maybe there is a conflict with upgrading.

If you have tried this let me know if it helps

I have a clean install of Mandriva 2006, also running the KDE desktop. I have found running K Desktop 3.4 is a lot more stable, and the machine does not crash as often. Also turn off APM and ACPI in the /etc/lilo.conf

eg: append="apm=off apm=no acpi=off resume=/dev/sda5 splash=silent PROFILE=default"

I have had this problem since I first installed over 4 months ago. I have rebuilt 5 times and used numerous different kernels - with no success.

Currently I am running 2.6.12-15mdk-i686-up-4GB kernel and I work primarily without GUI interface, so in run level 3. I boot directly into init3 for stability and only swith to GUI run level 5 (init 5), as and when needed.

I was pretty sure it has something to do with the BIOS power management, but I have disabled everything I can in the BIOS. Still freezes, but not as often if I don't use the GUI ... so now I am thinking display settings/driver

Hope this helps

I am having the same type of problem with Mandriva 2006 Power Pack and lock ups with the video. The difference is I am having this problem with NVidia FX 5500. I have only had a little time to mess with it between work and other things. It has happened while video was playing if that is any help. I know it isn't the hardware because it has all been replaced since I had my last crash except for the harddrives and sound.

The system is a dual boot and runs awsome in Winblows, well for it running the evil OS. I am tempted to install 2005 LE to see if it locks up with it as well. The MB does have SATA, but it is disabled in the bios so I assume it isn't an issue. I am always coming back to it being the videocard. Before the last system melt in this case which it turned out to be an overheat problem... Damn heat compound pads suck. All the other hardware is still good and will replace my firewall PII 450 system when I have a little extra cash.

Back on point now. Any help with this problem and NVidia would be greatly appreciated

2005LE (after the updates) works very well for me, now on 4PC's, all with different hardware.
2006 has been very disappointing on all the above hardware, so it's back to 2005LE for me.
If the next version is as bad I'll be saying "Hello Suse!"

I also have an ATI 9100 on my HP laptop and I have the same crashing problem with mandriva 2006. Its actually pretty much random freezes, and its always when I have not used the pc for some time. I had the pc download all updates for my system so I'll see if that fixed the problem and let you know.

Well I believe I have solved the problem (fingers crossed). It appears that the Nvidia drivers do not like having the AGP bus speed overclocked. It would lock up regardless, but video4linux being used by say tvtime or kaffine would make it lock up faster. I have set it back to the default and so far it has been up for 41 minutes according to uptime. Anew recoord...lol

Figured I would post an update.

Well, that's definitely it. There should be somewhere you can lock the AGP bus. You should NEVER o/c the bus speed of your slot cards, it offers no increase in performance, and could overload the cards in the slot. I didn't even think of that, because I didn't think of it as being an issue.

Well it was my issue. I am now looking at an uptime of almost 17 hours straight with no lock ups or even a hiccup.

On the note of overclocking a slot. AGP I have heard both yes and no on overclocking it. I have had system builders tell me they have noticed a difference in bench tests. I have on certain things noticed a bit of difference, but overall I am still out with my verdict.

I forgot to mention above, the system also ran flawlessly with the latest Cooker (2006.1) over the weekend. Both before and after installing the NVidia drivers for my video card via PLF. It actually appears to me that it ran even better then 2006.0. Even though it was running so well I decided to toss it back for another attempt at 2006.

The first time I installed this system with 2006 was with the December club 6CD set. I wasn't in the mood to sit there and change CD's out so I went for my PowerPack DVD. It wasn't the best choice seeing it was about 1GB of updating, so if you have a choice between the two choose the December club. All said and done it works.

My final words on 2006 are as follows. It is still my favorite distro eventhough with the change in corporate structure it has suffered in quality control. I have found it to be buggy out of the box not only on this machine, but also my firewall machine. This is especially on the note of hardware. Items that were never an issue before all of a sudden are. A bit of tweeking and those pesky hardware issue are a thing of the past and keeps on going and going.