System Freezing Up on Nearly Fresh Install

[Xplorer4x4]

Ok, time for a bump here. Now obviously I am not on a nearly fresh system, but believe I have found something useful. Last night I went to install Ubuntu in a VM. I figured even though Unity does not look as appealing as KDE, why not give it a shot. Well during the Ubuntu install, the VM was lagging like crazy, but the linux side of the machine was fine. So I decided to see what google would turn up. I saw some mentions of Intel cstate being the culprit and how to adjust this. I found a tutorial from 2006 that is to old I guess, but I booted in to the bios and disabled the cstate function which means the cpu is now running wide open 24/7. So now that cstate is disabled, I can throw about any work load at my rig with no freezing at all. Is there anything I can do to find some sort of medium between power saving and performance?

[Xplorer4x4]

One of the last things I recall doing before this happened was installing this:
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php...?content=69401
I am wondering if I should try going through the install script and find all the utilities it installed and remove them.

Also, this time the freezing is not as bad. For example I can perform simple hash checks in vuze with out the whole system just bogging down. I can extract 1GB split archives with out trouble. The trouble usually starts when there is a large size hash check or multiple extractions. I think my system should be more then capable of handling the load of extracting 4 sets of 1 GB split archives at once especially since this is on the SATA3 drive.

[Xplorer4x4]

You shouldn't need the Intel drivers at all in your setup. You might consider removing xserver-xorg-video-intel and observing the results over a couple days.

Ok So I figured I would bump this before doing a clean install..again. Obviously this is far from a fresh set up now though.

I took your advice and removed the xorg-video-all package as that needs to go before the intel package can be removed. It did make an improvement but did not seem to resolve it 100%.

Sent from my DROID2 Global

[SteveRiley]

You shouldn't need the Intel drivers at all in your setup. You might consider removing xserver-xorg-video-intel and observing the results over a couple days.

[Xplorer4x4]

Another theory, could the intel xorg drivers and ati/amd xorg drivers conflict? Why do I need the intel drivers when the mobo has no video out? Thinking back about it, and I think I mentioned this in the other thread, the problem started after an update for the Intel xorg drivers from the stable xorg ppa. Now that I have a back up, I added the x-swat ppa again, and had an update for the intel drivers. I have not checked the post date to see if they have been updated since my issue started.

[Xplorer4x4]

There's an issue of some kind with your source repos or your installed packages -- this should not be happening on a system with only the default canonical repositories enabled. Is that still your configuration?

What does

sudo dpkg --configure -a

say?

I found the solution. Teamviewer had installed but was lacking dependencies. I just had to do dpkg -p teamviewer and that fixed it.

The freeze happens so suddenly and thoroughly that there's no time for any process to dump a log entry before the entire computer hangs.


In many of the comments on those bugs, you'll note a major and a minor theme. Major: switchable graphics. Minor: freeze triggered by USB activity (mostly mouse moving/scrolling). That the freeze happens on my machine with switchable (but disabled discrete portion) graphics and with USB peripherals but not on my machine that lacks this combination appears to mean something. Exactly what, though, I'm not sure.

For what it is worth, I have plugged my android handset in a few times and been using this desktop a ton getting thing reconfigured slowly to try to catch the problem sneak back in. So far it has not shown up again. I am still running my ATI card(mobo has no video outputs even if I wanted to). You may be on to something but in my case I suspect either using RAID mode was the problem, or a dependency got pulled it and was causing a conflict somewhere. The closest I have been to reproducing the problem was extracting 4 folders with split archives, about 1GB each, and the system completely froze for a few minuets until the extraction was done. It did not instantly respond though, it was a gradual process of regaining control of the mouse/system.

[Teunis]

I'm glad my W520 has so far not shown this problem, during the daytime I typically run it on the nVidia graphics as that's the only way to use a second screen and at night I often use the Intel mode when on batteries. In both modes I plug in and unplug USB-2 and -3 devices like, the (MS) mouse, a card reader and hard disks.

[dibl]

any time I try to run apt-get install somepackage, it keeps telling me to use apt-get -f install.

There's an issue of some kind with your source repos or your installed packages -- this should not be happening on a system with only the default canonical repositories enabled. Is that still your configuration?

What does

sudo dpkg --configure -a

say?

[SteveRiley]

Are there any logs that might be usefull in narrowing down the root cause?

The freeze happens so suddenly and thoroughly that there's no time for any process to dump a log entry before the entire computer hangs.

I am curious to hear more on this theorey. If you could prove it to be true, atleast it is a step in the right direction.

In many of the comments on those bugs, you'll note a major and a minor theme. Major: switchable graphics. Minor: freeze triggered by USB activity (mostly mouse moving/scrolling). That the freeze happens on my machine with switchable (but disabled discrete portion) graphics and with USB peripherals but not on my machine that lacks this combination appears to mean something. Exactly what, though, I'm not sure.

[Xplorer4x4]

Something else that I just remembered..in my previous installs, I had RAID turned on in BIOS. However, I did not have an actual RAID array installed. It was more for preparation. This time around, I choose to use AHCI. I could have used IDE as well and according to a lot of old forum threads that appeared in google IDE was the better method. However, these threads were all from the likes of 2008 and 2009. So far, I have not seen any performance issues while using AHCI and wonder if using RAID might have caused a conflict the last time around. For those not familar with my old thread, the conclusion was it must be software related because I could create a new user account and not experience any system freezes,

[Xplorer4x4]

I am using the offical firefox atm and it seems to be working fine. In the previous install though, kde-firefox was one of the very few packages installed...

[pauly]

I had to uninstall firefox and kmozilla helper from the kde goodies ppa. I was having the same issues but not anymore.

[Xplorer4x4]

So far so good! I have only installed a select few programs and some small system tweaks. I was looking to install Teamviewer 7 as I use this for remote desktop from my phone to pc but I am hesitant because when I run apt-get -f install to gather dependencies, it wants 80MB and maybe 40 or more packages. Also, any time I try to run apt-get install somepackage, it keeps telling me to use apt-get -f install. I dont think teamviewer is actually installed though. How can I fix that so I can install other packages and not be force to install the teamviewer depencies? Just try dpkg -u teamviewer7? I just remembered teamviewer for debian/*buntu is actually the windows binary with a custom made wine wrapper(so it seems). Would that explain the huge list of dependencies?

Also whats a good back up program with an easy way to restore? I used kbackup to back up my previous install in case I forgot to grab some important files, but has no restore option. Ideally I would like something comparable to arconis true image home.

Sent from my DROID2 Global

[Xplorer4x4]

Are there any logs that might be usefull in narrowing down the root cause? I have checked the x-session errors previously, and it was of no use. I chcked it now and found alot of errors which I thought was strange from a still vanilla system(aside from adding wallpapers using the built in downloader and manually. http://paste.ubuntu.com/1115243/

I think there's a weird problem involving switchable graphics and the kernel's USB subsystem.

I am curious to hear more on this theorey. If you could prove it to be true, atleast it is a step in the right direction. I would test, but sadly do not have a video out on my mobo which further makes me think that the intel video would be disabled automaticly. How would I check for the intel xorg drivers? I have dug around numerous places and everything I see points only to the xorg raedon drivers.

[SteveRiley]

Those bug reports have become nearly useless because they encompass such a wide variety of systems.

On my T520, the nVidia GPU is disabled in the UEFI, thus Linux never sees it. My X1, which doesn't have a dedicated GPU, has never once frozen. Personally, I think there's a weird problem involving switchable graphics and the kernel's USB subsystem. Witness the number of reports describing causing crashes with a ramped-up GLXGears script or by moving an external USB mouse around a lot. That would be a truly nasty bug to bisect out.