I have a rather odd crash that pops up now and again on my laptop. Acer TravelMate 2420, Slackware 11.0, custom 2.6.18 kernel, KDE 3.5.4.

What happens it that, every few times I try to play a media file (audio, video, DVD, etc.), the computer crashes. It'll work fine once, and then it'll work fine again, and then I'll open another video and it'll crash after an abnormally long load. The video, where applicable, will simply go blue (a blue screen of death, if you will).

I cannot switch consoles and the computer responds to nothing less than the magic SysRq key. This is mystifying me. I should also note that, on the console, music works fine indefinately using mpd and mpc.

It sounds to me like X got stuck. I've had a quite similar problem with an old geForce 2 nvidia video card (using both, the opensource and the binary-blob drivers, but it seems to happen more often with the binary-blob one), but it appeared mostly when running an OpenGL app (but I barely played a few videos with it).

If you can log in via SSH, you'll probably see X using a lot of CPU.

If you want my suggestion, try another driver (if there's another for your video card) or the vesa driver (but you won't get ANY acceleration and that means that you'll probably not be able to watch full-screen videos).

Also, maybe disabling some accel options (if there are any) in your media player could help.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've tried disabling acceleration in xorg.conf, and my rather low-class test of "just opening six video files really quickly" didn't crash anything. That's probably not good enough to get a good idea, but I'll have the time to find out properly soon enough.

As for trying new drivers, the driver in question is for an Intel i810 integrated graphics card and it's nicely available in the kernel, so I'm not sure anybody would have bothered making something else. Might look into it if this doesn't work or if the lack of acceleration really gets on my nerves, though.