I'm running feisty on an HP dv4000 laptop. I'm using both the low-latency and generic 2.6.14 kernels.
I keep religiously updated to the repositories. Starting today, gnome desktop and even the gdm login screen have been freezing on me. Sometimes the freezing is brief (for a matter of seconds), sometimes it's very long (many minutes). It's not clear whether or not input that occurs during the frozen time period is always lost.
I'm pretty sure (but not absolutely positive) that when I switched to working in kde today, this problem didn't occur.
I also tried using Windows for 30 minutes or so just to check that it wasn't a hardware problem. I had no problem in Windows, although it's possible that I didn't stay in Windows long enough to truly confirm that it's a only a Linux or Gnome bug.
I'm not 100% certain, but this also may be only occurring when I'm having wireless lan connectivity problems.
More info:
- I didn't know if this happened when I was power-unplugged only, since that's when I'm using wireless usually. But it happened again with power-plugged-in + using only wireless (ethernet not plugged in).
- I wrote a Python program to loop, printing the time after every second of delay:
from time import *
while (True):
sleep(1)
print asctime()
I'm pretty sure that if just the display was frozen that I'd still see output timestamps that were only one second after the previous, because of internal output buffering. But I am seeing gaps in timestamps at the same time I experience UI freeze, so this may be that all (at least user) processes are experiencing the freeze as well. That is, it's not just an X-server issue.
- I also ran that program from a virtual console, so that if it was an X problem, I could tell. But that Python program running on the virtual console also showed big gaps (up to 5 seconds, iirc) in its timestamps, so I really don't think this is just an X problem.
- When this happens, I don't seem to have anything else going on with the laptop in terms of heavy computation. So afaik, this isn't an issue of one of my processes hogging the CPU.
- When I was having the problem before at a cafe today, I noticed that my WiFi LED was blinking sometimes when I had this problem. The blinking LED normally indicates that the radio is on but I'm not connected to a WiFi network. That made me think that maybe WiFi issue were the trigger of my woes. However, I'm currently working from home and have a good (~ 67% strength) WiFi signal, and I'm still having this problem. In fact, after having the problem a few times, my WiFi LED light is *off*. The light should only be off when my radio is off. But I'm able to use the web right now, so I know my WiFi connection is good (And NetworkManager Applet 0.6.4 agrees.)
So this makes me wonder: Could a problem with my WiFi driver be making my whole system unstable?