Comment 23 for bug 24533

On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, Antonio Ricardo Soares da Silva Correia wrote:

> Richard, perhaps you are right in what concerns the ATI 7000 but that
> doesn't explain why my system works flawlessly with the other
> distributions and only fails with (K)Ubuntu. Oddly enough, now, even the
> plain 686 kernels don´t work in my machine. I´ve tried all since I
> installed Dapper and they freeze in X like the SMP ones. I wonder if
> they have merged 686 and 686_SMP kernels because I had one running for
> about 2 minutes before freezing and gkrellm indicated 2 processors what
> it only does with the SMP version of the kernel. So as you might guess,
> since Dapper was released I'm forced to use the 386 kernels and keep
> wondering why this just happens with (K)Ubuntu and not with the other
> dists. What are they doing wrong?
>
>
Yes, I, too, am able to run the SMP kernels from other distros. But as I
demonstrated, it's clearly an interaction between the X server,
specifically the ATI driver, and the kernel. Possibly those other distros
are still using XFree86, and haven't made the switch to xorg?
   Would you do a little testing? Perform the checks that I described
earlier:

1) run `lspci`, and post the result line that describes your video card.
2) Reboot the system with the 686 kernel, to a console prompt, as I
described earlier:
a) go to 'system settings/system services', and turn off kdm in runlevel 3.
b) edit /etc/inittab and change the initital default runlevel from 5 to 3
c) reboot, selecting the 686 kernel from the grub menu
d) Login, and play around enough to satisfy yourself that the kernel alone
is stable.
e) Issue the command `startx` and report the results.

It might also be informative if a Gnome user with a 686SMP/Radeon7000
system would chime in with their experiences...