I have a Dell Inspiron 1420, with opensuse 11.0, KDE 3.5… i am facing a peculiar problem in the last few days. My laptop is hanging all of a sudden without any prior symptoms.
My fan is running ok, though I dont know why it never goes beyond a certain speed.The problem may be related to temperature(though I am not sure, because I have even experienced it to have collapsed when it was left to itself for a long time eith no running process)
I have to hardboot the laptop whenever it hangs, which I know can be dangerous to the health of my laptop.
Can anybody identify the problem? Is it due to temperature, or KDE, or something else?
The laptop does not have dust in the vicinity of the fan.
I also thought that there might be some fan problems.So, I installed i8kutils,but I found that the i8kutils settings were overwritten by the BIOS settings. Even if I issued the command for high speed, the fan started with high speed but after 2 seconds or so, it returned to the medium speed. So, I uninstalled i8kutils and Installed dellfand, but again it could not modify the fan settings.Although I wanted high speed above 37 degree,it was never to be so. It went to high speed, but returned back to the medium speed(although temp was above 37) within 1 second.
So, I uninstalled dellfand also, and presently the fan speed is controlled by BIOS.
The fan, however, keeps on working when the system collapses.So I gave up the idea of temperature problems, but the log messages are again suggesting a temperature related problem. The log messages just before the last collapse are as follows:
Sep 21 23:31:41 linux-k1fv smartd[2969]: Device: /dev/sda, SMART Usage Attribute: 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel changed from 64 to 63
Sep 21 23:31:41 linux-k1fv smartd[2969]: Device: /dev/sda, SMART Usage Attribute: 194 Temperature_Celsius changed from 36 to 37
First thing I’ve learned to suspect (after memory, which I assume you tested by
booting up standalone mem-test from DVD/CD install media), is the
graphics driver. (Many scenarios include 3-D screen-savers, which exercise
code paths that are often buggy.)
To test that possibility, downgrade to using the ‘vesa’ driver and see
if that makes hangs go away.
I was having a freezing problem happen every few hours on my notebook. At first I thought it was my ATI driver, but it still happened after I removed that. So I tested my memory, no problem there.
It turned out to be a wireless PCMCIA broadband card I had recently added that was causing it. I got a PCMCIA to PCI adapter and was able to duplicate the problem on a couple of desktop systems.
The solution for me was to update my kernel to the latest version available in the repos, which is currently 2.6.25.16-0.1.
I think there was some sort of kernel incompatibility with this device. It still happens rarely, like once every 10 days, but that seems to have fixed the problem for me, at least on my system, assuming it is even the same problem.
The problem may be due to my Intel 965 GM video card driver. The last two freezings took place with a 3D screensaver running for quite a long time (with amarok in the background)… exactly same conditions both the times. However, even with exactly the same conditions there was no problem for quite a few times, when the screensaver was not allowed to run for a long time.
During the last two freezes,there was no other processes running.So it counts down to the following to processes: amarok & screen saver.
Re: I dont know much about the video card drivers. How to downgrade to vesa driver?
I have this laptop, and did have problems with random KDE crashes and freezes when under a moderate load which produced decent temperatures.
My problems seem to have gone away when I updated the BIOS. To do that, I used FirmwareUpdateKit (check which repo at software.opensuse.org). Ever since, the fans have come on much more regularly and I haven’t had any of that behavior.
You may still have an issue relating to 3D and something. I have the same graphics and use the Intel driver and KDE4’s graphical effects with no problem. Then again, I don’t use 3D screensavers (they’ve never worked all that well for me for some reason).
Hi, yes I have an Inspiron 1420 and that started happening a few days ago.
What is that a symptom of? I had this happen right after upgrading Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 and I thought it was because of that but the upgrade was causing other problems too so I decided to try some new linux distros and it’s happening in Suse and Fedora now. I though it might be heat too, but it has happened a few times when the laptop hasn’t been on very long and was still very cool.
What exactly does “I would try a very long-term test with memtest86+ to rule out a memory failure.” mean? I’m pretty new to Linux…
Thanks!
yankes1903 wrote:
> foresthill;1878902 Wrote:
>> Hey Larry,
>>
>> What is the Caps Lock light flashing a symptom of? I just had my system
>> freeze up and noticed this was happening.
>
> Hi, yes I have an Inspiron 1420 and that started happening a few days
> ago.
> What is that a symptom of? I had this happen right after upgrading
> Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 and I thought it was because of that but the upgrade
> was causing other problems too so I decided to try some new linux
> distros and it’s happening in Suse and Fedora now. I though it might be
> heat too, but it has happened a few times when the laptop hasn’t been on
> very long and was still very cool.
> What exactly does “I would try a very long-term test with memtest86+ to
> rule out a memory failure.” mean? I’m pretty new to Linux…
> Thanks!
The caps lock blinking at a 1 Hz rate is the result of a kernel crash. It is so
severe that no recovery is possible. One way to resolve this problem is to
download the Linus-2.6 git tree and do a bisection.
What firmware/BIOS version are you all using? I’m using the newest from Dell (A09)- no problems here. Apparently Dell has added tools for managing firmware upgrades (and more) in the following repository:
I have been travelling around the web for two days looking at this problem. It is not hardware related. I have a Toshiba but several other brands have been mentioned.
It is not battery or temperature related.
This only started to occur with a certain level of kernel.
I am using 2.6.28rc6 but it started a few versions back.
The Ubuntu forums have been complaining for some time.
In addition everyone seems to be blaming all sorts of different packages/hardware.
I THINK THE PROBLEM IS IN HOW THE MODULES GET LOADED AT STARTUP.
I stumbled on this because I am compiling from source two modules uvcvideo and ath9k. ath9k was being blamed for a lot.
However, uvcvideo has never worked for me after a boot, I have always had to do a rmmod/modprobe.
So when I installed ath9k and started getting these freezes I thought I would do the same(rmmod/modprob) for it.
I was also having problems with sound so I reinstalled that as well.
I also did an rmmod for all modules that I was not using such as irda.
Previously I would be up for about 10mins(with the network running NX) before it would freeze.
I have now been up for a couple of hours.
Not definitive yet, but better.
It appears as if the freezing is caused by the wireless driver.
Just downloaded and installed, from this site Download - Linux Wireless
The latest wireless-testing kernel 2.6.28-rc7-wl.
Compiled and installed fine using the ath9k driver.
The above kernel replaces the standard 11.0 one.
HTH
Brian
bnc1234 wrote:
> It appears as if the freezing is caused by the wireless driver.
> Just downloaded and installed, from this site ‘Download - Linux
> Wireless’ (http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download)
> The latest wireless-testing kernel 2.6.28-rc7-wl.
> Compiled and installed fine using the ath9k driver.
> The above kernel replaces the standard 11.0 one.
I am a bit confused about what works, and what doesn’t.
Which kernel/driver combinations fail? Does the kernel and driver in
2.6.28-rc7-wl work?