Mint Katya (a derivative of
Ubuntu Natty Narwhal) on my AMD-64 system has suddenly developed a penchant for spontaneously rebooting. So far, it has only happened while I'm typing. I think it has happened twice when I was typing messages in
Thunderbird and once or perhaps twice when I was typing in the
Yoono plug-in for
Firefox. I don't recall any recent updates to T-bird, Firefox or Yoono, nor have I changed my keyboard (in case this is related to n-key rollover -- my fingers sometimes get ahead of my brain when I'm typing). The mosquitoes have gotten quite aggressive (and numerous) around my house; maybe they drove some gremlins indoors?
Update #1: I was sloppy above. It's not Mint that is rebooting; it's the X server. This is apparently a
common problem,although the variety of symptoms posted there suggest that this is in fact multiple distinct bugs with a common end result (X crashing). Things I have discovered:
- Unlike several of those reports, I have not experienced any crashes as a result of clicking. Only typing triggers a crash.
- Unlike the reports from laptop users, power management is not the culprit (the machine that crashes for me is a desktop).
- Someone pointed the finger at running the AMD-64 version of Natty on an Intel CPU. My copy of Mint is in fact based on the AMD-64 Natty, but my box has an AMD-64 CPU.
- Turning the proprietary nVidia driver off and then on did not help. (I have a GPU from nVidia.)
- Installing xserver-xorg-video-nv did not help.
Update #2: I used the wizardous
sgfxi script to update my nVidia drivers a few days ago. Since then I have had no spontaneous X crashes. I hesitated to claim victory lest it be premature, but today I wrote a moderately lengthy blog post (touch-typing at my usual subsonic speed) with nary a glitch. So hopefully the driver reload cured this problem. Thanks to Harald Hope for a handy script!
Update #3: See
this post for earlier problems and
this post for a later round of nVidia issues (and how I resolved them).
It's been very looong time since I got problems with the X server.
ReplyDeleteSpontaneously rebooting sure it's not a derivative of Windows and not Ubuntu ? Next you will be getting that really nice looking blue screen...
@Bo: If it were a Windows-induced reboot, the OS would delete itself from the hard drive prior to the boot, and grub would pop up a gloating message from Steve Ballmer.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this. I've had exactly the same issue with Katya and with Natty, but using the 32-bit versions. Nvidia proprietary is no better than nouveau for this, just as with you. I haven't tried the sgfxi script. Maybe that should be my next step? This is the first I've heard about it.
ReplyDelete@rk: I can't say with certainty that the Nvidia driver update cured it, but I still have not had any X crashes/reboots since I ran the script. I think the script goes to a non-repository site (Nvidia's web site?) and grabs the latest and greatest driver. I'm not sure that the proprietary driver install through the control panel gets the latest version. Good luck!
ReplyDelete