Re: Linux instability - graphics?

Owain wrote:

It would be nice if linux was as stable as windows ...

Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon, Asus MX-2V MX mobo, 1gb ram, onboard graphics,
gnome, fancy visual effects turned off. Appls in use are Thunderbird and
Opera.

Ubuntu freezes periodically, goes through bouts of being unstable (less
than 5 mins uptime) then is stable for hours and hours. Sometimes it
just freezes, sometimes the display flickers or is corruipted, which
makes me wonder if it's (a) not ubuntu but just the X layer or graphics
driver, or (b) a graphics hardware fault.

I have similar on a dual processor Athlon (Tyan Tiger board, I think) with a
Radeon 9200 PRO graphics card, running Ubuntu 7.10. My experience is that
the graphics crash usually happens when running a 3d application, so my
suspects are

* Mesa
* Xorg
* Hardware

It doesn't make any difference whether I use the 'radeon' or the 'ati' X
server, so if it's Xorg related it's at a higher level. However, if it was
software more people would be reporting this, so I guess it's hardware.

ctrl-alt-delete doesn't do anything, so it has to be a hardware reset
every time.

Is there a way of resetting X whilst keeping my applications running?
It's annoying losing the contents of an email in progress three times in
a row.

No, but you should be able to save most of your data. SSH in from another
machine, send kill -HUP to your applications, then (as root or, on Ubuntu,
sudo) kill -KILL the X server process

--
simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; All in all you're just another nick in the ball
-- Think Droid

.

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