Slackware 12 random Xorg crash ATI Radeon
 

I have been using Slackware 10.2 for quite some time, and decided it was time for an upgrade.

I installed Slack 12.0 on a new hard drive and most things seem to work fine, but Xorg locks up randomly. Everything will be working fine and all of a sudden nothing will respond. My mouse still moves, but window manager is unresponsive. I can ssh in to the machine remotely, but there are no messages in Xorg.0.log.

I used xorgsetup to create my xorg.conf file. The video information is as below:

Driver "ati"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
BoardName "RV370 5B60 [Radeon X300 (PCIE)]"

The only apps I'm running when the crashes occur are Opera, Firefox, Thunderbird, Konsole and Gimp. I've upgraded to the latest flash plugins, but the crashes didn't seem to be any different before or after the upgrade.

I don't believe it's a hardware problem - I can give specific hardware info if anyone thinks it will help, but the system ran flawlessly under Slackware 10.2. The only hardware area that might be suspect is the power supply, it's an older supply and may be a little low on power, but again, it worked fine prior to the upgrade. In fact, I have one less hd than I did previously.

If anyone has any thoughts on finding the problem, or just making the system stable, please let me know.

Ouch!

You know, it looks like you don't have the ATI proprietary drivers installed (that you used xorgsetup is the giveaway). I've had great luck with the proprietary drivers in both Slackware 11.x and 12.x. For example, Googleearth works wonderfully.

Maybe go to http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html and get and install the drivers might go a long way to making things do what they're supposed to -- read the installation document (it's really straightforward) and chose the automatic install option -- takes longer to download the drivers than it does to install and set up; basically, you need the kernel source tree installed (it usually is when you install Slackware) and you just run the installer that you download from ATI.

Hope this helps some.

Yeah, I knew there was something else I was going to post.

Here is the driver entry from my Xorg.0.log:
(II) ATI: ATI driver wrapper (version 6.6.192) for chipsets: mach64, rage128, radeon

I have not installed the ATI proprietary drivers, I will give that a shot.

Thanks for the tip, I think that fixed it. Updated the driver and no more crashes so far.