Linux Mint Forums

Meow

Linux Mint 13 freezes about once or twice a week. Also Mint 9 before.
(Hm, but in later observations I see, in fact he freezes once or tvice a day. Maybe situation changed this days.)
Mint 13. I mostly use SeaMonkey. Freezes at clicking some links - topic titles in forum. More times at fast moving - scrolling from bottom of the page to the top. And few times just at waiting to load selected topic.

Hardware:
Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-8S655FX(-L)
CPU: Intel Pentium IV 2 GHz
Graphic: Saphire Radeon 9600SE 128 MB RAM
RAM: 2 GB (4 x 512 KB)
WLAN: USB - Edimax - EW7717UN
Forgot something?
Aha, Mint 13 fresh installed few weeks ago.

It is verrrrry annoying, because, even Windows 3.1 was not so unstable. Win 3.1 was kaput maybe once per few months.


Ponny

Sounds like a graphic problem or memory problem.
Did you installed the correct ATI driver?

NVidia driver?
I have Graphic card: Ati Saphire Radeon 9600SE 128 MB RAM
By the way. I made memtest for Mint Live - 5X. No errors found.
Ah, yes, this graphic worked wery well many years ago, with Fedora..... I forgot version number. No freezes at Fedora.

I see, there in the Mint repos are two graphic card drivers - or maybe more - for ATI Radeon.
FGLRX, and a few packages started with xserver-xorg-video-
What version should I install?
Aha, is FGLRX under GPL?

By the way, Mint 13 crashed - freezed already twice today - 5 minutes ago, and 4 minutes ago.
This is too much


Ponny

Meow

System Information Tool in Linux Mint 13 reports this about my graphic card:
================================================================
VGA compatible controller : Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV350 AQ [Radeon 9600] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

Name: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV350 AQ [Radeon 9600] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Class: VGA compatible controller
Domain: 0
Bus, device, function: 1, 0, 0
Vendor: ATI Technologies (http://www.ati.com)
IRQ: 16
Latency: 32
Bus Master: Yes
Memory: 256MB (32-bit, prefetchable)
I/O ports at: 0x9000 - 0x90ff
Memory: 64KB (32-bit, non-prefetchable)
========================================================================================
But in fact, there is 128MB of memory.
About next memory data - 64KB - I don't know what it means.
Could be this reason for all this crashes?


Ponny

Sorry, I forgot to sent you this information.

I have installed this packages:
xserver-xorg-video-ati
xserver-xorg-video-radeon

But problem is: Why Mint 13 see 256 MB memory on graphic card? There is only 128 MB.


Ponny

Maybe I forgot this info. I upgraded Linux Mint 13 to newest kernell: Linux Mint 13 MATE 32-bit, 3.2.0-36-generic.

A also tryed to look output of this command:
less /var/log/dmesg.0
less /var/log/syslog
less /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old
less ~/.xsession-errors

Uf, there are a lot of...... stuff. I understand nothing. Should I report to you any of this..... stuff?


Ponny

Oh God, now already freezes every day.

But why nobody wants to help me? Maybe I was not good enough? Well, all right, I go right now tear the snow. I'll probably good enough.


Ponny

Hoy, forum gurus, are you sleaping? Wake up! I need help! Please!

Ponny

Ponny wrote:NVidia driver?
I have Graphic card: Ati Saphire Radeon 9600SE 128 MB RAM
By the way. I made memtest for Mint Live - 5X. No errors found.
Ah, yes, this graphic worked wery well many years ago, with Fedora..... I forgot version number. No freezes at Fedora.

Have you considered that you may be having a hardware problem with an old card?

Two ways to troubleshoot that I can think of. Swap in a different video card -- I'd recommend a "low end" GeForce 220 or so since I've never been very happy with ATI graphics cards and quit buying them long ago.

Second, try installing Fedora to another hard drive and see if the problem goes away. Can you boot a "live CD" and try doing what tends to trigger the freeze?

I've issues with LM13 but stability is not one of them, My systems have weeks of uptime and would have much longer except I've been swapping in a bunch of video capture cards for testing with my V4l2 code.

If the card only has 128MB and its detected as having 256MB that could be the problem if the driver ever tries to use the non-existant RAM. Could be a driver detection bug, or a problem with the card.

I agree with everyone else here; try seeing if the graphics card is the point of error.

If that doesn't work, I'd suggest turning using rcconf to turn off the "ondemand" daemon. Try that out for a while and see if that makes a difference. Just don't do anything too CPU-intense since your CPU may get hotter because it makes scaling turn off(never has caused me trouble though). Back on Linux Mint 9/10, this was the only way I could stop my computer from randomly freezing every day.

Ponny wrote:Hoy, forum gurus, are you sleaping? Wake up! I need help! Please!

Please, don't do this anymore. It's not necessary to draw attention like this. If anybody isn't responding to your post that doesn't mean that people don't it. Sometimes it take some days before somebody response to a post. So, stay relaxed and wait for a few days. If nobody responded to your post you can decide to bump your post without this kind of (stupid) text.

Nomko, you're right. I am too much in a hurry. I would like someone to solve my problem, quick, now.
But unfortunately, these issues can't be resolved quickly.
I'm sorry, dear gurus.
Right now you gave me a lot of material for thinking.
I'm sorry again and thank you for all answers.


Ponny

Please allow me just one question.
Does Pentium 4 processor supports scaling down?

This is specifications:
-----------------------
Intel Pentium 4
2.00GHz
Code Name: Northwood
Number of Bits 32
Instruction Set MMX, SSE, SSE2
Platform Name Socket 478 mPGA
Revision C1
Technology 0.13 µm
Original Clock 2000 MHz
Original System Clock 100 MHz
Original Multiplier 20.0

P.s.: Applet fo monitoring CPU frequency shows 0 MHz, or -1% in percents.
CPU Clock 2020 MHz
System Clock 101.0 MHz
FSB 404.0 MHz
Number of Cores 1
Core #1
Speed 2019.9 MHz
Multiplier 20.0
Virtual Technology Supported No
Hyper Threading Supported No
Cache
L1 Data Cache 8 KBytes
L1 Trace Cache 12 Kµops
L2 Cache 512 KBytes

P.s.: Desktop applet for monitoring CPU frequency shows 0 MHz, or -1% in percents.

Hoy-hoy

Sorrry for long time waiting. But in meantime I upgraded kernel from 3.2.0-36.57 to 3.2.0-37.58. Then I needed a few days for testing, if there is some changes. No changes.

Then I started with this test - turn of system service named "ondemand". Again, no changes. First freeze after few minutes.

Well. that's it. What now?


Ponny