Hi all,
I’m quite new to linux, but till now I’ve been able to fix everything that bothered me (mostly by UTFG). I’ve been trying openSUSE 12.1 from liveCD
occasionally from November last year, and after some time I installed it on my desktop, which runs smoothly. However, my laptop died, so I have to use another one. As on the old one everything was ok, I noticed when trying the liveCD, that from time to time the system got frozen on the one I use currently.
About 2 months ago I finally installed openSUSE 12.1 on my laptop, which I use far more than desktop. And the freezing problem persisted even on the full (DVD) install.
I use openSUSE 12.1 with Gnome 3.2, English locale
Hardware (a bit older):
Asus F3J laptop
CPU: Duo T5600 (2x 1.83GHz)
2GB RAM (I manually added 1GB from the dead laptop )
Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon X2300
About the problem itself:
It happens about once a day or two (but it fluctuates as sometimes it is few times a day and sometimes not a whole week).
Whole screen freezes, but I can still move the mouse cursor. It even changes when hovering a link and stuff, and if I scroll, the change to the hand shape appeares where the link in the browser is after the scroll (which is not visible itself). I can even change to another tab in Firefox and see the cursor changing as if the new website appeared under it. But still the only thing that changes on the screen is the cursor itself, moving in a still background.
I can still control music players with multimedia shortcuts on my keyboard.
I can use Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, but I lose the session. It also sometimes works, and sometimes I end up on frozen login screen.
I can of course switch to terminal by eg. Ctrl+Alt+F1, but I see nothing suspicious like intensive CPU usage or full memory (in htop). Xorg uses just few percents after switching to it and back to the terminal, but in a second the load is close to none.
When the problem occures, in /var/log/messages shows up:
May 1 15:42:07 old-notas gnome-session[2057]: Gdk-WARNING: gnome-session: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.#012
and more following (see pastebin below)
/var/log/messages when Xorg freezes - Pastebin.com
I tried some fiddling about the graphics drivers, after reading
http://forums.opensuse.org/information-new-users/advanced-how-faq-read-only/438705-opensuse-graphic-card-practical-theory-guide-users.html
which helped me a lot to understand, however didn’t help to fix the problem.
“Xorg -configure” in runlevel 3 didn’t help, at the end it wrote something like “could not detect the graphics hardware”, not sure precisely what was there.
Manually changing to “radeon” driver in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf changed nothing, apparently it was used automatically before, as I checked in the “/var/log/Xorg.0.log”.
Changing manually to use other than “radeon” didn’t help, as none of the others provided direct rendering, so Gnome started in something like fallback mode.
Installing proprietary ATI driver “fglrx” didn’t help too, at the graphic card here is too old to be supported, so I had to uninstall it.
It doesn’t depend on which theme I use, as it happens with the default “Adwaita” just like with any other that I tried.
I can say that it doesn’t depend on any software running, as I tried not using some and it still got frozen. Just one exception is Firefox, I got it open almost always :-P. But it happens whether I use it at the moment or not.
It happens only when I actively use the laptop, I left it running for few whole nights and nothing.
There were no problems when using (preinstalled) windows, so it seems like an incomplete hardware support to me.
It bothers me most because in a month I’m going to summer school far abroad, and I will need a reliable laptop.
Please, don’t answer like “try another distro”, it will be the last instance for me. And also temporary, as I’m looking forward to buying new laptop, of course with linux running on it smoothly on mind
Thanks for any usefull responses