RH9 freezes on Dell D600
 

Hi There!

I just got a new Dell Lattitude D600 (Pentium -M, 1.5GHz, 1400x1050, 1GB Ram , 40GB HD, CDRW/DVD) at work.

For some work related software I need to run Red Hat 9.0 with KDE.

Generally all works fine just using the default drivers but at some point the laptop will just freeze - i.e. no response to mouse or keyboard. If the network is activated a ping gets responded but FTP or Telnet get no answer. After power-cycling the system works fine again until - the next freeze.

I have tried turning off all internal devices, using APM, ACPI or none. I have compiled and installed the Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet driver but also tried without; same with the ATI Radeon 9000 driver vs. the standard one.

The freezing occurs at different stages and I cannot enforce it. Out of 20 or so runs it occured at the first run boot of RH, mostly when installing our companies software which contains 3rd party software such as Java, Java 3D , Netscape and such, but sometimes also late when installing Oracle 9.2.1.0. I have installe the software on about 10 different desktop) PCs, so I am pretty confident it is not an application software problem.

Did anyone experience a similar behaviour and got over it or can anyone recommend on how to trace the problem?

I have seen the worst freezes in 2.6 kernel distros as a result of USB problems,...

Apparently a USB snafu can lock the X11 system... for instalce, when using key drives and such.

It's worth a try...

What do you mean by snafu? I am running the original 2.4 kernel as it comes with the RH distrib. I have tried the updates to the latest 2.4 kernel, too but with no success.

The system for sure has USB, but I am not intentiously using any devices - the floppy which is USB is usually removed. I have suspected the cd-rw/dvd drive so far as the freezes seem to occur when it is accessed, but I believe it is an IDE-drive not USB.

How would I avoid the USB problems? Not using the cd-rw/dvd at all doesn't sound to good to me.

2.4 kernel??? CD drive??? OK,... Your problem might be a result of the SCSI emulation that CD burners require under the 2.4 kernel. The 2.6 kernel supports CD burners under IDE without SCSI emulation.

You can't switch to a newer 2.6 kernel Fedora release or another RPM based distro???

Only the one or the other year later I found it working fine with SpeedStep diasbled in the BIOS...