[NBLUG/talk] Diagnosing lockups

[Troy Arnold]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 04:01:27PM -0700, Bob Blick wrote:
> My computer has lately taken to freezing up. The first time it was
> sitting with an open Firefox window and when I came back to the computer
> a couple of hours later it was frozen in place. No response from mouse,
> keyboard, and I couldn't get a ping from another machine. KDE desktop
> looked fine, clock showed time about a half hour earlier. The next
> couple of times it was in Firefox and then Konqueror. I blamed it on the
> Flash plugin. But today it froze in Thunderbird when I had just
> doubleclicked to open an email.

> This is an older Athlon 2800+ machine with a simple Nvidia video card
> and a Kubuntu 6.06 install.

If your machine isn't pingable, then it's not directly a userspace thing
like flash.  Although something like flash certainly could be the
instigator that causes the nvidia driver to puke.

> Is my next step to see if Nvidia has a new driver and try that?

That's a good plan.  I experienced hard lockups too on a fresh Ubuntu
Hardy amd64 install.  For Hardy, the fix was to install 'nvidia-glx-new'
instead of 'nvidia-glx'.  I don't believe that package exists in 6.06
though, unless someone has made a backport.

-t