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[LUG] Advent / KDE / X crash history solved?
Rick, Simon, Robin, Gemma and others who have tried to solve the
intermittent system crashes on this Advent 5372DVD laptop.
A little history:
1. I'm a KDE fan and have tried some dozen distros on this laptop -
nothing has solved the problem, until now.
2. The problem itself was a complete lockup crash with no warnings, no
logs, no successful interventions. It was a case of remove the battery,
unplug any mains and fsck on reboot. Most ugly.
3. Factors like air flow, temperature, activity, disk spin-downs - all
were excluded one by one. There was no correlation with uptime,
workload, fan blockages, activity etc. Even at the recent St. Peter's
school meeting, I was unable to run the laptop in X, I had to use init=3
to maintain a usable system.
After moving to Debian and upgrading to Debian testing (sid), I found
that Gnome 2.4 solved the problem completely. Hmmm. Worth pursuing.
Gnome (unlike KDE) didn't load the battery monitor applet into the panel
by default. Gnome 2.4 then ran without a single halt.
Installing the Gnome battery monitor applet caused absolute mayhem. The
trackpad cursor would disappear into unpredictable corners and refuse to
budge without Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, the panel would respond to
non-existent keystrokes and mouse clicks, moving the menus to silly
positions, hiding, even changing timezone settings!! (The laptop
suddenly went onto New York time!) Interminable 'q' keystrokes appeared,
causing no end of problems with apps that use 'q' for Quit! The Gnome
battery monitor applet was hastily halted and then uninstalled. All was
suddenly OK again.
Now, I remembered that KDE used to do this before the upgrade to KDE3.1
SOLUTION:
Quit the KDE battery monitor applet in the panel.
That's it.
I don't know if this is a one-off problem with my battery (it does seem
to behave strangely sometimes - flicking between full and on-charge and
back to full) but it may help others with this laptop or similar.
--
Neil Williams
=============
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