Yes I’d been pinning my hopes on the next kernel update, seeing as the issue was apparently fixed in 2.6.37rc1 and shouldn’t be difficult to backport. Was dismayed to see no mention of it in the update that arrived today. At this rate, 11.4 will be out and that’ll inherently bring the fix faster than waiting for an update.
I’m still sticking with Konqueror to minimize the daily freezes and the only good thing is that after well over a hundred total system hangs in recent months forcing a hard reboot, I’ve not yet had any loss of data on my ext4 partitions.
Using Linux 2.6.36.2-3-desktop i686 from the tumbleweed repository and NVIDIA 260.19.29 has eliminated nagging random freeze issues for me. But these updates have other issues. (2.6.35 was pretty stable too but NVIDIA driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.53 seemed to cause random freeze ups).
Can’t run late kde4.5/4.6RC releases.
Can’t get VBox4 to run on this kernel.
I decided stability was the winner. I don’t have to run a VM or KDE for now. Hopefully everything will sync soon! Haven’t Had a freeze since before 12/14/10 when I installed the Tumbleweed kernel.
Unfortunately my main laptop is not nvidia and I do need vbox, I tried several kernel versions on a spare hard disk/identical build and none of them fixed the random freezes.
How easy is it to upgrade the stock 2.6.34 kernel in openSUSE 11.3 to the latest stable 2.6.37 version? Do I simply add the kernel:stable repo, select the kernel file for upgrade in YaST Software Management, allow it pull in whatever other dependencies and reboot (choosing the new kernel from the GRUB menu)? I’ve asked before on these forums about simply swapping the default for the desktop kernel but I don’t know how much more hairy it might be when stepping up to a newer release. Would doing this likely cause any compatibility issues with other software?
Considering the risks of updating my kernel weighed against these regular lockups which might corrupt my data, I’d like to give it a go, but any advice is appreciated.
I know not everybody contributing to this thread has exactly the same issue, so this won’t help you all, but for those with Radeon 9600/9700 cards this should be of help. I’ve finally got the problem fixed by installing the 2.6.37 kernel, and whilst previously I was having to restrict the number of running programs, switch from Firefox to Konqueror, use the touchpad instead of the mouse and turn off desktop effects just to minimize the frequency of the freezes, since the kernel update I’ve now been able to throw all that out the window and had no crashes at all.
At the time of writing you would need to get the 2.6.37 kernel from the Kernel:HEAD repository because Kernel:Stable still contains 2.6.36, but that may get updated soon. I also needed to add Kernel:HEAD:Virtualization to resolve some dependencies and pull in an updated version of VirtualBox. Having clicked ‘Switch packages to versions in this repo’, I rebooted and had only the new kernel to choose, so I’m not sure how you’d go about keeping the old one alongside. Perhaps you just need to install the new kernel files rather than switch packages.
In early December I added the kernel:stable repo and made “zypper dup” (once), and so far no problem in continuing upgrading via Yast. It kept the kernel 2.6.34 (from the official repo) together with 2.6.36 (from the kernel:stable repo). But do it at your own risk!!!
If you want the kernel 2.6.37 and cannot wait for kernel:stable to update, you can use kernel:head; but I would recommend to disable that repo afterwards, as the “rc” (and thus not stable) versions of 2.6.38 will enter that repo later!
