I have had three crashes since I installed Ubuntu (6.06 desktop i383) this morning. The first time it crashed at a 3d screensaver. The second time it crashed when I started glxgears (the only thing that still worked was my Skype conversation and my mousepointer). The thrird time it crashed when I started glxgears again.

So it came to my mind it must be a graphics driver/OpenGL problem. I tried a lot of other distributions before and I never had any problem with a 3d screensaver or Quake3 or Unreal Tournament2004.

When I run glxgears there are two warnings and one error displayed by the terminal.

There is a small delay between running glxgears properly and the crash. I might get lucky copying the text from the terminal and posting it here before it crashes again.

My hardware:
AMD Athlon 2800+ XP (barton) (x86)
ATI Radeon 9800pro (r350)
ASUS A7V8X motherboard

What can it be?

Ok so this is what the terminal says:

hi V!NCENT.

I think it's not the graphic card driver. I had the same thoughts when something similar happened to me.

Are you using, by any chance, an Atheros card? or the madwifi driver? You might need to recompile that.

No. I just tried Knoppix 5.0.1 and opened the 3D demo Elektrofunk by Razor1911 (a demo, no software piracy!!) through wine and got pretty much the same log in the terminal. After two seconds it crashed. It must be a software issue because older distributions run just fine.

Ubuntu actually doesn't have a graphics driver installed by default so it's not the graphics driver?

I have the ATI radeon 9700, and ubuntu uses the "radeon" driver, perhaps that driver doesn't work too well with 9800. Have you tried to install the fglrx driver?

Ubuntu actually has no ATI driver. Knoppix however does. It both crashes.

I just ran glxgears on Kate OS live 2.1 and it did not crash.

mimithebrain@MimiLinuxBox:~$ lsmod | grep fglrx
mimithebrain@MimiLinuxBox:~$ lsmod | grep radeon
radeon 119872 1
drm 78484 2 radeon
mimithebrain@MimiLinuxBox:~$

I will try easy ubuntu

Wich did not work because it told me some packages were broken. So I installed the ATI driver from the restricted repository. I started loading glxgears wich did not crashed anymore but now runs at 1 to 1,5fps Running the Elektrofunk demo was horrible! I felt like running Windows XP on a 486! it was half a frame per 5 seconds and the sound was way behind from what was displayed on the screen.

Now I can run 3D games that do not crash... at 0,0005fps.

you can always try fglrx instead of radeon.
However, in my experience, fglrx isn't always good. If you install it from the ATI website, it messes up your fonts.

I just Installed Myah OS and I can recommend it to anyone who's having problems with Ubuntu. Ati drivers were allready installed and work right out of the box. All media runs out of the box too. Any DVD movie you throw in just works! It has a lot of apps. It has KDE instead of Gnome, but it also has Koffice instead of OpenOffice so that's a major con. The upcomming version of Myah OS will also have Wine wich may be important to some of you. It is also free (as in freedom and as in beer).

Enjoy!