Entire system crashes in Jaunty periodically

[Scott Lewin]

About every 20 to 60 minutes my entire system will crash. The mouse pointer will still work, but everything else does not. No response from the keyboard and no response from clicking on anything. The only thing I can do is do a hard reset of the computer; pressing and holding the power key until the system shuts off.

This is a fairly new install of Jaunty and I installed it from the final only a couple days ago. I never had this problem when using the Alpha or Beta of Jaunty earlier. It also seems that my wife does not have any problems on her laptop. My laptop, the one not working is a Inspiron 1525 and my Wife's is an older Inspiron, 1501 I think.

I think it may have something to do with my video card as it is not well supported in Linux. It is an Intel GMA X3100. Celestia and Google Earth basically work, but with a lot of graphical glitches and the opengl section always overlaps everything else. It may also be the desktop effects as I added a couple extra. I am going to try and shut off the desktop effects to see if that works.

I'm using Kubuntu 9.04(Jaunty) on a Dell Inspiron 1525.

[Scott Lewin (sclewin)]

I shut off desktop effects and the computer is still crashing about every 20 minutes. I have started to shut things off and still get the crashing.

[daveted (ajrtin)]

same problem with same hardware!
Don't know where it comes from and find nos specifical logs in syslog or kern.log...
My install have been done by a upgrade version from Intrepid.

[Scott Lewin (sclewin)]

Do you have any plasma widgets on your desktop? I deleted three of the system monitor desktop widgets and the computer haves been working for over 3 hours since without a crash.

[Scott Lewin (sclewin)]

Another, likely, possibility is did you turn on "slideshow" for the desktop wallpaper? I think that may be the problem as well.

[Scott Lewin (sclewin)]

It looks like the problem is the slide show feature for the wallpaper. I switched the wallpaper to image and since then, about a day now, there haves been no crashes.

[frinkazoid (frinkazoid)]

I'm a Kubuntu jaunty user on a dell inspiron 1525 and have periodical (every 10 mins) freezes. I can still ssh to the machine and all processes are still up. I've had an apt-run finish perfectly while the screen still said 'downloading'.

It says something about plasmoids a few posts back, is this only KDE related ?

[frinkazoid (frinkazoid)]

I don't have a slideshow wallpaper, so I wasn't able to turn it of; hence the situation is the same, still crashes.
I've checked syslog/dmesg/xorg.log but can't find anything to guide me towards what could be wrong.

When the crash happens, I log in from another pc and issue the reboot command, strange thing is that nothing moves, until some 5 seconds before the actual reboot, the entire screen goes blue with some kind of repetitive pattern.

[frinkazoid (frinkazoid)]

reverting the intel driver to the one used in intrepid fixed the freezes
guide as to how:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReinhardTartler/X/RevertingIntelDriverTo2.4

 I'll be switching my 1525 back to intrepid shortly however because I find that while it doesn't crash anymore; performance is nowhere near intrepid levels

[agklein1 (andyklein)]

Seeing the exact same behavior here on the same hardware: a Dell Inspiron 1525 with Intel GM965 / X3100 graphics chipset. Reiterating above:
  + mouse pointer still moves around, nothing else works.
  + only way out is hard reset.
  + can remotely login, but find absolutely nothing abnormal in log files (syslog, Xorg.0.log, etc).

For the record, I don't have slideshow wallpaper nor plasma widgets, so I don't think that's it. I do have desktop effects enabled. This laptop ran fine with Ubuntu 8.10 and 8.04, so something is different here; I suspect the Intel graphics driver. The install of 9.04 was a clean wipe & install. No idea how to troubleshoot this one, but it makes the system unusable.

Also, I am using the latest stable Xorg drivers (via the X-Updates PPA), UXA acceleration, and have the workaround for the MTRR bug in place. More details on all that can be found here -- http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1130582.

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

Hi Scott,

This bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? Can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/lucid.

If it remains an issue, could you run the following command from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p linux 366796

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. 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. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.

[This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Scott Lewin (sclewin)]

I am using version 9.10 now and I am not even using Kubuntu anymore as I now use Ubuntu. I am also using a different computer, so I am not able to test this further. As I mentioned earlier I did not see this problem anymore after making the changes I listed.