Flickering issue with a Samsung laptop

[Alexander Bumgardner]

I updated to Ubuntu 12.04 a few weeks ago. Had no problems until today or yesterday. If im listening to music, it will keep playing. However, trying to backup my system, the process was paused and would not run. The upper-right screen displaying sound levels always displays when this happens, the computer freezes, and the screen flickers. The only way to get back to a working system is to continuously shut down until it will run without this occurring.

I am still relatively new to linux, so I am not sure what commands to run to give you the full system info printout. I am running a samsung laptop, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32-bit. I have an Intel® Pentium(R) CPU B950 @ 2.10GHz × 2.

Please email/contact me asap for any further needed info I may provide.

[papukaija (papukaija)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:

* Does this issue occur only with the backup tool or also with some other applications?
* Is this reproducible?
* If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?

This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[Alexander Bumgardner (spungotomer42)]

This issue occurs randomly and with no regard to any applications. It will occur sometimes when no programs are running, immediately from startup. At other times it will occur when I am online. Sometimes it occurs while I am offline working on something. It has nothing to do with any applications, I suspect it is caused by one of the recent kernel updates.

I do not believe it is reproducible because it is not linked to any specific action or application. It is a problem unique to a certain ubuntu update and I have no idea what causes it, what is happening when this bug occurs, or how to diagnose it or work on it.

It still happens. Can anyone tell me if it will be addressed in some future update? Will I just have to deal with this? What should I expect?

[papukaija (papukaija)]

There is a flickering issue with some Samsung netbooks which is currently being investigated and will be fixed in a future update. Could you please confirm your laptop's model? Thanks in advance.

[Joseph Salisbury (jsalisbury)]

Would it be possible for you to test the latest upstream kernel? Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Please test the latest v3.5kernel[0] (Not a kernel in the daily directory) and install both the linux-image and linux-image-extra .deb packages.

Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. Please only remove that one tag and leave the other tags. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text.

If this bug is fixed in the mainline kernel, please add the following tag 'kernel-fixed-upstream'.

If the mainline kernel does not fix this bug, please add the tag: 'kernel-bug-exists-upstream'.

If you are unable to test the mainline kernel, for example it will not boot, please add the tag: 'kernel-unable-to-test-upstream'.
Once testing of the upstream kernel is complete, please mark this bug as "Confirmed".

Thanks in advance.

[0] http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.6-rc1-quantal/

[Alexander Bumgardner (spungotomer42)]

What all do I download? the kernel/mainlinebuilds ubuntu wiki says I only need the common headers, architecture specific headers, and architecture specific image? What's up with packaging.patch , changelog.patch, and configs.patch? Do I need those?