Machines freezes
 

Hey! I'm having a similar freeze problem. My laptop is two years old at most, but it has this freeze problem with pretty much all newer distros. When it freezes, no key combination will do anything. I had someone ping my computer at a Linux meetup while I made it freeze, and they said the computer was totally dead when it happened.

The easiest way to make it freeze is to hit the screen brightness keys too fast or to hit them at all during another intensive process. However, it also freezes randomly when it is just "overwhelmed." For example, I could have several windows open (browsing folders, browsing web, and theme settings), click to apply a setting, immediately try to switch to a different window, and it will freeze. This never happened in my older systems.

Systems that freeze:
Ubuntu 12.04 with any operating system - Gnome Shell, Unity, KDE, XFCE, Linux Mint Cinnamon (3.2 kernel)
openSUSE 12.2 Gnome Shell (3.4.6 kernel)

No Freeze:
Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 (2.6.32 kernel)
Debian Squeeze (2.6.32 kernel)
Slackware 14 KDE (3.2.29 kernel)*

This one I have installed, but haven't figured out how to get it connected to the wireless yet. Not sure if that has anything to do with it.

I have no idea how to begin researching this. I don't even know if it is a driver issue or a kernel issue.

My thread (unsolved): http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi....php?p=4831934.

So you can cause it to lock up on demand by doing screen brightness?

Have you tried disabling ACPI when you boot? If you open up the grub command and append acpi=off at the end of the kernel line you can run the kernel without acpi for that time until you reboot to see if you can get it to crash. What model of laptop is this? There maybe a bios update that will help to fix the acpi issues.

I noticed too that most of the issues seem to stem from the newer kernels. Even though you have a newer kernel in slackware, typically unless you specify during the instal acpi isn't on by default in slack ( to my knowledge). Also were all of these versions i386 or AMD64? I know that starting with the last version of Ubuntu you have working the default download was still 1386 unless you specified when you download that you wanted the AMD64 version, I bet you may have some issues with running the CPU in long-mode. I've had some laptops in the past with similar issues, and I was forced to run 32-bit mode with acpi disabled for stability. Can you get these other versions of Ubuntu to crash in single user mode?