Weekly edition	Kernel	Security	Distributions	Contact Us	Search
Archives	Calendar	Subscribe	Write for LWN	LWN.net FAQ	Sponsors

A strategy for dealing with a flaky computer

Posted Oct 16, 2009 1:13 UTC (Fri) by jmspeex (subscriber, #51639)
Parent article: A strategy for dealing with a flaky computer

I also happened to do an upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty on my 3 year old machine (2 GHz Core2). It turns out that I experienced *exactly* the same problems as described in the article. My machine ended up being really slow as soon as there was any IO operations in the background. I also encountered the keyboard lockups with the mouse still functioning. The problems also started with the "upgrade" to Jaunty. My conclusion is that Jaunty is a terrible distro (I wasn't too happy about Intrepid before it, but Jaunty is definitely worse). I'll try out Karmic when it's released, but if this one is also bad, I'm considering switching back to Fedora (last Fedora I used was FC2, which was totally broken on my machine).

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Oct 17, 2009 11:57 UTC (Sat) by bboissin (subscriber, #29506) [Link]

Same here (laptop with intel chips), played a bit with vanilla kernels and
xorg-edgers packages to try to improve the reliability, ended up upgrading to
Karmic beta and so far it's much better.

Jaunty was in my opinion a quite bad ubuntu version.

A strategy for dealing with a flaky computer

Posted Oct 24, 2009 3:03 UTC (Sat) by ccurtis (guest, #49713) [Link]

I've had a very similar experience: On Jaunty X would occasionally use an inordinate amount of CPU time. Firefox randomly did the IFRAME-popout thing and crashed with some regularity. I'm running an Athlon 64 dual core (5000+, which is apparently 1GHz per /proc/cpuinfo) and the dreaded NVidia binary driver.

I recently upgraded to Karmic and - so far - things are much better. My uptime is only a bit over 3 days and KDE does a lot of strangeness, but the interactivity is much better. Some KDE app crashed early on (I don't recall which) and the bug feedback utility hung after running overnight so I killed it. The next day I saw that 'gdb' was using still over 80% of my CPU but I didn't even notice.

I attribute some of this to the new 2.6.31 kernel. Now I just need KDE to stabilize a bit more and then we can move on to complaining about apps again.

A strategy for dealing with a flaky computer

Posted Oct 24, 2009 16:04 UTC (Sat) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

The Firefox IFRAME-popout bug also happens on Hardy, and has been an issue since Firefox 1.0 and earlier - see http://lwn.net/Articles/357074/ for link to the Mozilla bug.

Interestingly, I don't get this bug any more since switching Hardy from a normal 32-bit desktop 2.6.24 to a PAE kernel, gaining access to about 800MB RAM as a result - perhaps the reduced memory pressure or something has made a race condition less likely. However, I do get frequent crashes which might be another manifestation of the same bug.