My computer froze again too. But the hangs are not so random most usually. This time it happened three consecutive times when I was trying to reach the bottom of a web page with firefox (yeah, I restarted, tried to reach the bottom and it happened again!). It usually happens when I'm using a web browser (but still it happened once in my login screen). I've also found a lot of errors by pressing Ctrl+Shift+J in my firefox at that page and some others ('Error Console' in 'Tools').

My system has stopped hanging. Seems it may have been some sort of hardware issue. I unplugged my sata drive from port 0 and plugged it into 1 on the mobo and since then I have had no problems. I have also undone all my changes to Bios and menu.lst, and it is still ok!

Why this works I have no idea. Sata is now consistent with the IDE cd drives which are on 1 rather than 0? It seems happier booting up (bit quicker)

Sorry this probably will not help you - but just in case....

It's interesting. my issue seems to have pretty much been solved by removing the wireless card. yours solved by reconfiguring your hardware. they all seem to be hardware related issues. Why would hardware that worked before not work on 9.04?

It seems I'll have to make a clean install of the 32 bits version...
I also did the #touch /forcefsck (yesterday) and nothing appeared to be wrong. It checks the swap partition as well, right? If it does, it might be some other hardware issue. Anyway I changed the plugs of the sata hard disk and dvd drive in the mobo today (though my Ubuntu is installed in the IDE drive). If it still hangs, I might install the 32 bits version after the next weekend and see if it works fine.

Have to say my sata drive was new. But it was a replacement, and I am now wondering whether there was a problem with my old IDE drive.

I was on 32bit Ubuntu 8 before and had the problem and bought a new drive thinking that was the issue. So moving to 32bit may not be the answer.

fsck does not check the swap space: swap is not a "file system," so there's nothing there to be checked by a file system checker. (To be pedantic, fsck is just a "front end" program that identifies the specific file system on a partition and starts the appropriate check program I.e., e2fsck for ext2,3, or 4 file systems; dosfsck for FAT; ntfsck for NTFS; etc.)

Drive cable contacts can be "oxidized," and end up with a layer of corrosion on the pins. Removing and re-inserting the cables can scrape off the corrosion and (temporarily) alleviate the problem. That's why "high end" cable often use gold-plated contacts, although a gold-plated pin into a non-gold-plates socket seems, to me, like a half-way solution.

Anyhow, simply reseating the the cables often works for a while.

Well, I'd like to check my swap space for errors. How can I do this? (I'm still newbie with Linux).
It also appears my swap is not being used. Is it normal to have these lines like this in the top command:

With 2Gbs of memory, it's quite plausible that your swap space would seldom be used. (This laptop has 3Gbs, and I've never see swap being used. In fact, I inadvertently disabled my swap space when I installed a secondary drive in it, and didn't notice the problem for several months. And I only noticed it when I was reviewing my dmesg output for an entirely different problem.)

As to checking your swap space, the only suggestion I could offer is to use the smartctl program (assuming your drive is S.M.A.R.T. capable, as almost all newer drives are) to check the drive containing the swap partition.

You can, of course, use a file in your regular file system as your swap space instead of using a separate partition. In that case, swap would be checked as part of the fsck.

If you have multiple drives, you could create a swap partition on each of them, and Linux would be happy to use all of them as a single swap pool. (In fact, the default for most distributions is to search all available drives for swap partitions and create a swap pool from all such partitions it finds. Settings in /etc/fstab can over-ride that default.)

I've seen a problem that sounds very similar to a number of others on this thread except that it happens with a 32 bit OS.

I have an Acer 2010 laptop which has been running many Linuxes just about forever now. Most recently I was on Ubuntu 8.10, and it was solid as a rock. Months and months of uptime.

But I just upgraded to 9.04 and I get random hangs about every 20 or 30 minutes of use. If I go back and boot from an 8.10 live CD, the hangs go away.

It's a hard hang as far as I can tell. No mouse, not pingable, ctrl-alt-F1 doesn't work, etc. I haven't waited hours or anything, but after some point it doesn't matter whether it might come back next month .

I am NOT sure of this at all, but I somehow feel it may be related to the wireless driver. It's just a gut feel; I have no evidence at all for that, except the hangs seem a little related to how much I have been using the wireless network which is using the ipw2200 driver. I'm going to try running it without that driver loaded at all and see what happens.

It's a little irritating since it's been fine on many different OSs before this for many years :-/

Well, I tried to use my Ubuntu without the USB wireless adapter before, but it hanged (I'm not sure if the driver was loaded or not). But it kind of makes sense, since my father upgraded to 9.04 (32 bits) in his desktop and had no problem, and he doesn't use wireless on it.

In modern English usage, the past participle of "hang" is "hung." The older alternative, "hanged," is now almost exclusively reserved for the result of an execution by hanging.

Of course, you may have been trying to say that something had executed your system, but, if so, your usage was somewhat awkward.

In my case the system hangs when the power-manager starts to reduce the display-light or to switch it off. I think there is some issue with acpi. If the mplayer is running, it is normally enough to stop it with SIGINT (Ctrl+C) to avoid a total sysem collapse. Or if the firefox-browser is active, it's enough to change the tab. Really strange... But I have to react rapidly, after a while there is no chance to recover except the RESET-button :-)

I believe this is you problem if you are intel graphics users especially gm 965.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...el/+bug/359392