so.... did you fix your problem???? I am having exactly the same issue and I don't have a clue of what to do to get this netvista machine with ubuntu breeze fixed!

Unfortunately, no, I have found no solution. I think it's a configuration setting somewhere, but don't have a clue at this point.

I have my /home partition on a second drive, so it's really painless to swap distributions. I decided to go to Debian Testing (Etch), and although it's very much more difficult to get installed and running initially, once tweaking everything to match, it's very similar to Ubuntu, less some of the more newbie friendly features. I really like the .deb packaging system with apt-get that Debian and Ubuntu use, and the general responsiveness and availability of easy to install software is great.

So anyway, my system has been absolutely 100% stable on Debian Testing. Everything works. I have no idea what is different, but I'm thinking it's directly in the xorg setup somewhere. It didn't make any difference what login manager I used, or whether I ran Gnome or KDE with Ubuntu I got the same behavior. Definitely hardware related too.

Good luck,

Ben

I also tried using KDE instead of gnome, however the machine freezes even if you just leave it the the GDM prompt, without opening a session or any application whatsoever.

I tried disabling DRI on xorg.conf, also tried replacing the old i810 graphics driver with much more recent version, same results.

I will try disabling openGL ... and later just replacing the whole xorg from the Debian Testing repository.... and see what happens.... still fighting...

New Theory: After installing Debian Testing, I upgraded to Gnome 2.12 from Experimental repository. I had no problems with freezing after that. Then, due to a few bugs I introduced I wiped it and did a fresh Debian install from Testing. The freeze is back.

The main difference I have seen, in fact about the only thing, is that there is a major dbus transition going on with Debian, and the new KDE is going to use it as well as Gnome. Installing Gnome 2.12 upgraded dbus with it (away from the old dbus-1). I am thinking that might be the middleman in this freeze issue. I'm not sure how to test other than do the upgrades again and see if it goes away. I know it's not 2.12 directly, since Ubuntu w/ 2.12 froze too.

I might be off on a tangent somewhere, but it's the closest thing I have found to a potential explanation.

Ben

My quick solution: install kanotix 2005-3.
It is still debian, and it doesn't freeze at all. Some stuff was a bit of a pain to get working (That's why i love ubuntu so much) but at least I can leave my server/workstation running with no fear it will freeze a few hours. It has been running for some two weeks on a row, with no problems.

Glad to hear it. I'm hoping as of today I have an actual solution as well. First, I tried again to upgrade to Gnome 2.12, which went very nicely, although the new dbus is so far incompatible with some KDE stuff, and in particular, it means I can't yet run K3B, which I guess is my favorite KDE application. Came back the next morning and it was all frozen again. SO I decided to change some setups in my xorg configuration, and I may have figured out something. I did a dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, and changed one setting to disable framebuffer support in the kernel.

This morning I came back in to work, and the pc is totally responsive and all is well. Might be a fluke, but I sort of think I might have hit on it. I'll look at the xorg.conf to see what looks different and make some notes.

Ben

Hello, problem solved ... i hope
uptime more than 60h whithout freezing. I followed instructions in
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...995#post556995
and added noapic nolapic pci=noacpi to the kernel line in grub.
This was for Dapper and I haven't tried it on Breezy.
Try this and report any progress.
Yours

If it's not too late for me to chime in here...

About 2 months ago I installed FC 4 on a slightly older machine (AMD Athlon 1.0 GZ, 256 MB--I mean, it's not THAT old!) that I have been using as my firewall (this is an upgrade from a MUCH older K6-2 machine) and had no issues whatsoever with it until about 2-3 weeks ago I started getting freezes too. At first I thought it was the screensaver, so I disabled that--no change. I thought maybe I would just leave it at the login screen instead of leaving myself logged in. Again no difference.

Since I switch back and forth between two boxes (instead of a dual boot system) I cannot tell whether XP or any other OS would work or not. When I switch from my XP box to the frozen system, I cannot switch back because the keyboard is now unable to communicate with the board!

What is REALLY strange about all this is the fact that my system logs report no errors. I'm logging firewall messages almost constantly, but they just stop as soon as the system freezes, and the next log entry I see is me rebooting the system, so I have no way of knowing what system problem is causing this.

My best guess so far is that perhaps--gulp--the CPU is dying on me. Again--hard to tell without any diagnostic tools or error messages to read. Any suggestions?

I do have to say this--Fedora Core 4 is far far more tolerant of improper shutdowns/restarts than any previous distro I have ever used.

Well, that's exaclty what I had. The fact that nothing produced errors really threw me. I am fairly certain only that a process of some sort is preempting input. What I noticed is if it froze at a command prompt , if I typed something, left and got a cup of coffee and then came back, there would eventually be some response, after a very long time. I tried the noapic nolapic pci=noacpi addition to the grub kernel line, and that seemed to work, but since I was still occasionally having issues I bought a new motherboard. That seems to have taken care of things.
Ben

How long ago did you install the new mobo? I noticed your previous post was dated 12/02 and it sounded like you had a solution. I take it that didn't pan out...

From the other posts it sounds like this is not distro specific, but may in fact be a growing problem with newer hardware. My previous machine was OLD--a Soyo socket 7 board with a 300 Mgz chip. I'd been running Red Hat since 5.1--one of the reasons I stuck with Fedora Core, despite some of the grumbling I'd read. I just use it as a firewall, which is why it's kind of annoying to keep having these freezes. Also, the fact that I had NO problems at all until around Thanksgiving (two months of solid performance) suggests perhaps a sudden deterioration of some hardware component or other.

Well, that was last week, and let me tell you, the Windows install was a real pain and had to be done from scratch. Couldn't get it to run again no matter what after the mobo. Debian fired right up, but I migrated my install to the new Dapper Drake pre-release Ubuntu just for the fun of it. Both seem fine. The total freeze thing was fixed with the noapic etc. lines, but I had some other random weirdness that affected windows too, including hanging at reboot on the BIOS screen about 50% of the time, so I decided it was time for some new hardware.

I've run lots of distros to evaluate them for work here, and once your really into the Linux level of the whole thing outside of the desktop, I guess you can make all of them do what you want. However, I've stuck with One Redhat knockoff or another for Servers, due to a mixture of familiarity and ease of package availability and support. I guess it has become a 'standard' distro. I use Debian based stuff on desktops. The package management and broad array of applications that just work are much less frustrating, and the machines feel more responsive. Just my opinion; I have no interest in flame wars or brand loyalty.
Ben

Thanks--knowing the noapic thing worked is hopeful--I'll give that a try.

You'll get no flaming from me! To me it all boils down to a question of what problems are you willing to live with.