I tried both the GNOME and KDE live CDs on my Lenovo ThinkPad T61p laptop and they both caused my laptop to suddenly freeze and require a hard reset after a few minutes of use.
I suspect that this is a kernel issue related to the wifi driver. My laptop has the Intel 4965AGN wifi card and due to a bug in kernel 2.6.27 it can result in a computer freeze. This is the behaviour I also encountered with Ubuntu 8.10 (fixed in post-release updates) also mentioned in the release notes at the link: 8.10 Release Notes | Ubuntu
“The version of the iwlagn wireless driver for Intel 4965 wireless chipsets included in Linux kernel version 2.6.27 causes kernel panics when used with 802.11n or 802.11g networks. Users affected by this issue can install the linux-backports-modules-intrepid package, to install a newer version of this driver that corrects the bug.”
Of course, it could be something else…
Has anyone else encountered this problem? Any solutions?
The problem is definately due to buggy iw4965 drivers included in the 2.6.27.x series of kernels. I had the same issue with the wireless, after a minute or two the laptop would lock up, and the caps lock key would be flashing. The only way to exit is to hard reset the laptop.
In Ubuntu Intrepid, all you have to do is to enable the backports repo in /etc/apt/sources.list, apt-get update, and apt-get dist-upgrade.
I do not know what the solution is in 11.1. I really like th polish and feel of the KDE 4.1.3 DE. This is extremely frustrating because this issue has been known for several months and has been a recurrent problem in Fedora 10 and Ubuntu Intrepid; the problem.
You could try enabling the factory-oss repo. There is a newer iw4965, iwl4965-ucode-228.57.2.21-1.10.noarch, compared to the older, iwl4965-ucode-228.57.2.21-1.9.noarch driver.
I’ve had a freeze twice (been using openSUSE 11.1 from Beta4). The freeze was not a full system freeze… only my X session and keyboard input seemed frozen. (Could not <ALT><Ctrl><Fx> to a console)
The mouse pointer was still moving and pressing the power button resulted in a nice graceful shutdown.
Nothing in the logs specific to the freeze though…
Still wondering what caused this… both times I was not really doing anything special. (first time SSH’ing to another system, second time opening an SSL page with firefox.)
where do you get that? I get the same laptop model with that problem. The weird thing here is that noly happen with my regular user. I have been using root to not have this behaviour.
I have the same problem on my compaq nw8000 with a Atheros Communications Inc. AR5212/AR5213.
I don’t think the wifi driver is the cause - I removed the module and it still freezes as a normal user.
root user works fine
I also tried KDE3.5 with the same result.
For the record, I have had the same problem. I am using a Pangolin Performance 4 laptop from System76, which ships with the same Intel wireless everyone else has been reporting problems with. It also works with the Ubuntu backported driver, but I prefer OpenSuSE. I have just installed the Factory version of the iwlagn driver and will report back in a couple of days on whether the crashes stop.
I have now been running for two days without any crashes whatsoever after upgrading. While I’m surprised that Intel ever released a driver with such an obvious defect in it, I’m pleased with the speed at which the defect was fixed.