Thursday, June 24, 2010

Ubuntu Crashes Hard: Acer 5570Z Laptop/Intel Graphics Media Adapter

When I updated to Ubuntu 10.04, I started getting hard crashes - no response from computer at all. Once even seemed to kill the install (although probably just the "grub" boot loader).

Intel GMA adapter support seems to be known to be problematic.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/i915Driver


I turned off fancy graphics. Seems to fix it for me.
-Right Click
-Change Desktop Background
-Visual Effects
-Select None.


Note 1. Ctrl-Al-Backspace to restart X is disabled. You should re-enabled it.
Enabling Ctrl-Alt-Backspace for Ubuntu 10.04

* Select “System”->”Preferences”->”Keyboard”

* Select the “Layouts” tab and click on the “Layout Options” button.

* Select “Key sequence to kill the X server” and enable “Control + Alt + Backspace”.
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/enable-ctrl-alt-backspace-in-ubuntukubuntu-10-04lucid-lynx.html

11 comments:

Test said...

First crash today since doing this. When I saw "hard crash", I mean that the keyboard, mouse stop responding, the hard drive stops spinning, and the the display "freezes".

Test said...

Well, it still bounced a couple of times a week, so I replaced the hard drive with an new ssd. Well, it's not the hard drive - same thing happens.

The SSD hard drive is very nice. I can reboot very quickly now.

Test said...

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/Freeze

Test said...

Still Crashing hard. Suspecting the wireless card, or hearing about people having trouble with more recent linux kernels - in fact openSUSE just started freezing occasionally at work.

Test said...

Still Crashing about once a week. Rumors are that there is a particular linux kernel that is more volatile.

I'm on Linux 2.6.32-21-generic #32-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 16 08:10:02 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux.

Test said...

So far, the best solution was: switching to OpenSUSE 11.3

Unknown said...

Did you manage to solve this problem? It may have something to do with USB. I can't really say for sure and most of my Googling hasn't shown clear indication of the cause, let alone a solution. I have an Acer lappy too and though it runs on Windows 7 (I'm positive it's not the poor quality of the OS, thank you very much! haha) it also crashes to bits and freezes up completely. However, since I don't use the Acer that often, I haven't really sat down and tried to solve the problem. I just notice that it gets really cranky when I plug in a USB flash drive.

Unknown said...

Just to add - I was considering zapping Windows and installing Ubuntu on the Acer lappy with the hope that the Ubuntu USB drivers may perform better but so far, from your experience, I'm not holdin my breath.

Test said...

I never got it fixed w/ ubuntu, but I never had the problem with Linux Mint Debian (My current OS of choice) or OpenSUSE 11.3 (2nd Choice).

Test said...

I am now thinking that this may be network related, and tied in with my flaky wrt160n router. ( http://grcomputerworks.blogspot.com/2011/01/facebook-redirects-to-myspace.html )

Ridhi Sharma said...

I have Ubuntu, and when I try to start Rhythm box, it crashes on start. What is the problem?

THX
Brad Fallon