openSUSE 12.1 - X server freezes - Fatal IO error 11

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 :wink: )
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 :slight_smile:

Thanks for any usefull responses :wink:

So I must suggest you consider installing the proprietary AMD video driver. please_try_again has a nice bash script that can do this for you you can find here:

http://forums.opensuse.org/forums/english/other-forums/development/programming-scripting/449058-upgrading-ati-driver-atiupgrade-16.html

Its a long message thread, this points to the end and you will need to read back or go to the start to find info about the latest version of atiupgrade.

Thank You,

I normally would not suggest this, but I have some painful experiences with ATI chips lately. I found that newer kernels have improved support through the radeon driver. You could try to switch to using the latest kernel from this repo : Index of /repositories/Kernel:/stable/standard

Will it install some suitable older verion of the proprietary driver? As I mentioned in the first post, I already tried the one (most likely latest) found on the official amd site.

If you are really sure you had it installed and it made no difference, then the bash script would do no better, but I do wonder if that was the case. You can remove the ATI driver, if really installed and try a newer kernel version just as Knurpht has suggested.

Thank You,

On 2012-05-19 15:26, Tomaskom wrote:

> 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.

Have you tried to connect (ssh) from another computer? To see if something
is using full cpu (top), for example.

Perhaps you can try using another desktop (gnome/kde).


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)

As I mentionet in my initial post:

About another desktop environment, I’ll try one of the others which come installed along with gnome by default, and see what happens.

It made a difference. My graphics weren’t supported, so gnome started in fallback mode (still better than on my desktop though… there I had to uninstall it from runlevel3 CLI via zypper).

I tried iceWM and KDE, and both suffer from this problem too (however with different symptoms).
**
I’ll do full backup and try the kernel update solution…**

In the area of kernel solutions, you can also compile your own from scratch using a bash script I have here:

S.A.K.C. - SUSE Automated Kernel Compiler - Version 2.71 - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

You can obtain any kernel version, back to 2005 if you like with this bash script:

S.G.T.B. - SuSE Git Kernel Tarball Creator - Version 1.80 - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

And using SAKC does not remove your old kernel as it will still be there as a backup if any problems comes up with the new one.

Thank You,

I noticed that the error I posted doesn’t always appear when the screen freezes, it’s rathe rare. Usually just nothing new shows up in the /var/log/messages O_o (no matter which destop environment I’m using)
Thanks for those scripts, I’ll read a bit more about kernel compilation and finally do it, as it’s my only hope at the moment:).

If you need help, please come back and ask for it. If its with the scripts, there is a place for a comment that I will answer.

Thank You,

This problem seems resolved in 12.2, no X freeze so far :slight_smile:
I suspect this was really a problem in the kernel drivers. I just wasn’t courageous enough to compile my own kernel, even while the 12.2 release was delayed.
Thanks anyway :wink: