Natty freezes every day

[Omnishambles]

Hello!

I'm using a Samsung RV509 notebook, with an nvidia geforce 315M grpahics card. I have the recommended driver activated (not sure which one is that exactly).

Whether desktop effects are enabled or not, my computer freezes every single day, at least once. It also doesn't matter what I'm doing: I got freezes when browsing with firefox, installing via kpackagekit, and so on.

What's annoying is (besides not being able to use the computer) that I can't even reboot the system; the power button doesn't work when the system hangs up, and I have to remove the battery to kill the machine.

I would be very happy if someone could help me with this.

[The Liquidator]

I can't say I know the answer to your problem but stuff like this is often graphics related.

It appears your card is a fairly recent model and it would further seem that the manufacturer is not currently fully supporting linux yet in respect of it

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=198396

I did find something about this card on the open source driver front although I don't claim to fully understand what they are saying.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=162171

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=162687


When your computer freezes it probably isn't the computer itself but is more likely to be the x window system, esp if the graphics are the problem.

Try doing a soft reboot by holding down the alt + SysRq keys together whilst slowly typing reisub.

[oshunluvr]

I would also eliminate hardware as the issue. Boot to another distro via USB and see if the behavior is the same.

Also, if the crash is X related there will be logging in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and/or /var/log/messages. Next time it crashes, note the time. Then after reboot go directly to /var/log and look at the date/time stamps of each log file. I would review each one of them that have been updated at or after your lock-up.

General rule of thumb in my experience: No log means hardware problem, not software.

[Omnishambles]

Thank you for your replies.
I agree that it must be my graphics card that causes the issue: I had a lot of trouble with setting up the driver properly. The driver came installed by default on the system, but it caused X to crash, and problems with desktop effects. Finally I reinstalled it and now it seems to work.
Unfortunately the freezing issue have been there since I installed Natty...and it doesn't affect Windows: I have no such problem there.

[oshunluvr]

If you suspect it's your graphics card, have you looked at your log files? Start with /var/log/Xorg.0.log

[Omnishambles]

I haven't had a freeze for a while, and I can't remember the date when it occurred last time. If it happens again, I'll make sure to check it out and type it here.

[Detonate]

You might also find installing a later driver than the one from the repos will help. You can do that by activating the x-swat repository. Instructions to do that are found in this post.

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3117178.0

[GreyGeek]

After you reboot following your next crash open a Konsole and enter
dmesg
and study the output for xorg related information.

[dtr]

Since I upgraded to Natty, I too have had many freeze ups, where nothing but rebooting by only using the physical on/off button on my desktop would fix it (ctrl-alt-delete or alt-print screen-k didn't work). I found it usually happened when I was using certain apps such as Firefox, Thunderbird and a few others. I also have had situations where the graphics would become pixelated (distorted) and nothing fixed it unless I rebooted, restarting X didn't help at all.
I suspected it has to do with KDE and nvidia not playing nice together, but who knows.

I hope this recent update today to KDE 4.6.4 will put an end to this seriously annoying problem. I know I started to consider switching distros, but have been holding out for this issue to be fixed.

[bailout]

If you are having problems with nvidia and natty try updating to the latest beta drivers from Philips ppa as in this post.

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3117119.msg265557#msg265557

The nvidia drivers in natty have a problem with kde and the version of xorg in natty.