I was about to praise Ubuntu ...

But I keep getting these freezes in which ctrl-alt-backspace or ctrl-alt-delete won't save me. I have to do a hard reset with the power button.

Now this could be due to the shaky nature of my power connection (the power jack from the laptop's brick doesn't quite meet up with the hacked power plug I installed to make this laptop work after I first acquired it). Having a dead battery doesn't help.

I don't want to burn the man to the ground, but come on. You have an experimental rigg with a known problematic power supply. How on earth can you expect any OS to work reliably on that. That Lenny does is not an indication that others should too. Seems more like a stroke of luck to me.

It is well known that Ubuntu has problems with freezing. I don't have time to search, but I've read the same thing many times, and had those problems myself. As far as I've read it's unique to Ubuntu. Apparently the development team has responded by telling users they are imagining things.

I'm unsure of this laptop's specs, but it seems to happen with a large number of older Intel IGPs (think 830 and older, although I haven't tested my 865. It may also be affected). My laptop was affected by this and I found a temporary fix by disabling DRI and using the older "i810" xorg driver instead of the newer "intel" - which looks terrible on the 830, btw. It's not really a huge loss since ancient machines and 3D aren't exactly good friends, but I miss being able to run compiz..

And yes, bigg, that's pretty much what's gone down. This problem started getting pretty bad right after Hardy rolled out and has yet to be addressed by the Ubuntu devs.

@r_a_:

The issue is easily isolated with one simple experiment:

Install a full Slackware on it, and configure X to use the "intel" driver.

Common lock-ups continue? It's the hardware.

Common lock-ups stop? It was the software.

I don't remember ever seeing Ubuntu 6.06 lock up, however, my use of it on a laptop is limited. Nonetheless, in quick succession after only limited use of the 8.04 desktop my machine was shut down two days in a row. The one critical factor is, I had just changed my preferences to sleep this machine after 40 minutes. I switched back to "never" and if I have recovered stability, that might just indicate that Steven is on to something.

But having a known hardware problem is sufficient cause for concern. It should be repeated on good hardware, before saying the observation seems to have validity. Ideally a laptop should be the test hardware.

[All serious]

Ubuntu locking up... pffft.

I've been running Ubuntu for ages and it's neve

LMAO

I've been using the i810 driver in Debian Lenny, and I'm having X problems. Using the Intel driver didn't change anything, so I went back to the i810.

I'm not sure what driver I'm using with Ubuntu 8.04, but I do know that Ubuntu configures X in xorg.conf VERY differently than Debian ... and just about everything else I've tried.

I really do think my random freezes are due to the power-plug situation, but I'm not 100 percent sure.

I did run Slackware on the Gateway briefly. I had a lot of trouble getting X configured properly. Since Ubuntu does it automatically, it's hard for me not to use it on this laptop, especially because I tend to like using GNOME.

haha NoDough :)

I get freezes on my work laptop running *Debian*, but only with newer kernels (that's why I somewhat grudgingly run 2.6.22 on it). It's got an Intel IGP (hint hint?).

The xorg intel driver has a lot of problems in Hardy. Try the ForceEnablePipeA option: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Quirks

Or try turning off framebuffer compression. That fixed it for me. See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=484087