OpenSuse 11.4 KDE Netbook Freezes

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#1

Hello everybody.

I’m using Opensuse 11.4 with KDE and have set the workspace type to “Netbook”.
Lately I have been experiencing complete freezes of the workspace (the horizontal panel and all it’s widgets and elements, the activity pages and even yakuake won’t respond to it’s hotkey) but the Alt+tab and the Ctrl+Alt+F12345678 key combinations and other programs that might be already running (like firefox and Akregator) don’t experience any problems and keep functioning uninterrupted.
Sometimes the workspace remains unresponsive indefinitely and in other cases some prodding and left-right click spamming seems to remove the problem in some weird magic way…
I usually notice that this freeze has happened after i decide to take a break from browsing with firefox and try to close it thru the ‘application control settings’ widget. That’s when i find out that it’s buttons can’t be pressed and with an alt+tab to the desktop I see that I can’t interact with it in any way. Most of the time i have to reboot my computer through the Ctrl+Alt+F1 terminal…

I also have to mention that i recently started using tumbleweed but the problem was there before that and nothing seems to have changed after the update from the tumbleweed repository.

I would be grateful for any kind of help or advice.
Thank-you in advance.
Dimitris

#2

Bumping full of hope!

#3

You may get a response if you’d post your hardware specs.

processor
video
wifi

#4

Thank you for your very helpful reply. Being a newbie I almost always forget to mention the most important stuff.

Here are my computer specs. I couldn’t find a way to edit my first post :confused:

Wireless card is a : RaLink rt3090 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe and its driver is the rt2860 one.

My CPU is an Intel Atom N455 @ 1.66GHz. It is an 86_64 and i am using the 86_64 edition of opensuse 11.4 (i forgot to mention it above).

Now about my graphics card i have trouble locating my xorg.conf and the su -c lspci command shows this : VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation N10 Family Integrated Graphics Controller. I dont know how to find out what driver am i using or the exact model of my card without checking the xorg.conf (i used kubuntu before i came here).

Again thanks for your help.

#5

When checking the “top” list in my konsole, during one of these freezes I couldn’t see anything occuply more than 4% - 5% of my cpu. Everything seemed normal.

I, also, still haven’t found how to edit previous posts :confused:

#6

Are your freezes related to battery power?

I’ve read a few threads where the power settings to dim display may be causing problems in 11.4 KDE.

Just a guess!

Most of the freeze threads I’ve read with 11.4, maybe all, have been on laptops/netbooks which may indicate a connection to power management?

System freeze and possible diagnosis

You’ll have to hope someone with more knowledge than I will pick up this tread and help out.

#7

Thank you for your kind reply. After testing, I concluded that it doesn’t matter if my computer is plugged or unplugged, if I am tampering with the brightness or with the power management settings or anything similar. Those lags occur kind of randomly and I haven’t even come close to finding a possible trigger yet. The fact that I am no linux pro makes my attempts at diagnosing the problem even more hopeless. I searched the forums and the web in general, quite thoroughly and, although I found tons of laptop and netbook freeze related threads and articles, I didn’t find anything that could be related in some way with what I’m experiencing.