Originally I used beryl dues to problems with installing compiz-fusion. I had a lot of issues with beryl, namely if I used it for a period of time I would get the screen flicker followed soon by a total system crash similar to the BSOD.

Since then I have: upgraded the kernel to 2.6.24-etchnhalf.1-686 (to support my built in sd card reader), updated my nvidia driver to NVIDIA-Linux-x86-177.80, and of course got rid of beryl and installed compiz-fusion 0.7.7.

I had two of similar crashes to this date and just snooping around in the graphical interface I think the problem has something to do with 'powermizer'. Compiz worked well for a while and I would have the same issues as with beryl, when I noticed degraded performance I opened the nvidia-settings program and looked at the powermizer settings. When working normally I would be running my GPU at full power but when the performance lacked (followed as I said by a system crash) it seemed to be stuck in the lowest performance level, and the CPU picked up the GPU's responsibilities (noted via the 'top' command and compiz CPU usage at 99%).

Here is a little script that I found that forces the card into the highest performance settings. To this date (approx three days straight with no reboot or Xorg restarts) I have ha no problems. Here is the script and hopefully it works for anyone with a similar problem.


#!/bin/bash
while true; do
nvidia-settings -q all > /dev/null;
sleep 20;
done


make it executable (as 'user'. root priv. not needed) and execute.

best of luck