I downloaded Kubuntu 9.04 the day it came out, to see if the bugs and other irritations of the previous release candidates had been worked out. At first, I installed it on my laptop, a Compaq Evo N800w and everything worked flawlessly out of the box, except for the PCMCIA wireless card, which I have yet to work out. That is, as they say, another story.
I worked on the laptop for a day or so and found myself quite happy with KDE 4.2.2 and the features it had. Though I had originally thought that the Plasma system would be worthless to me, once I found out that many plasmoids could be put in the dock(s) – it was an easy sell. The home directory encryption through ecrypt and flawless mounting of said directory at login, plus the added speed (quite noticeable) and large file size support of the EXT4 filesystem were icing on the cake.
I appreciated the new features and the new look and grew to like it enough to take the plunge. I installed it on my desktop system at home and work.
That’s when my troubles began. The saga went as such…
The systems both ran on an nVidia Quadro FX 3000 video card, which have served me well for some time. My old setup was running KDE 3.5.10 with Compiz-Fusion 0.7.4 without a single problem. I had been running Beryl for some time and Compiz before that and have only had a handful of crashes over the years, no worse than dropping out of X to the KDM login screen.
Kubuntu 9.04 was not destined to be that nice to me.
After installing on my home machine via Kubuntu’s upgrade path from 8.04 LTS to 9.04, things ran well enough for a time. But I started to get random lockups. Not X crashing, or even a kernel dump – it just locked up. After a hard reset, there was nothing in the logs to say why – which lead me to believe it is was kernel issue and a bad one.
At first I thought that perhaps the update process was messed up and I should install from scratch. After reading a few posts on various groups talking about disabling KDE4′s desktop effects to stop lockups, I figured I’d try that first. No luck. I disabled Compiz, going right down to bare bones KWM. No luck. Random lockups, with no rhyme or reason to them.
It smelled like a kernel issue to me, but I had no proof.
I finally decided to update my work workstation, which had the same card, to see if it might be an nVidia driver issue. No problems, even running with two monitors. The motherboards were different as were the CPU’s, but the video cards were identical, which made me put the aspect of a video driver problem on the back burner.
On a lark, a friend of mine gave me an old card he wasn’t using anymore, an nVidia GeForce 7600 GS. The 7600 took a newer driver and has a different GPU, which I thought might help me diagnose things if it worked without a problem. No go. It still locked up. It still smelled like a kernel issue.
So far, my home workstation was the only victim. Something with the motherboard, perhaps? I would have kept thinking that way, except that over the weekend, the work system locked up as well. Nothing in the logs. No sign as to why. I wasn’t even logged in locally to the machine, just remotely across SSH.
Now I had two different CPU’s (both AMD), two different motherboards and two different video cards (both nVidia, but running different drivers) which kept locking up on me. Thinking that perhaps the nVidia commercial drivers were the problem, I removed those from the equation and ran the open source “nv” driver instead on both machines. No luck, they both still would lock up randomly. My home workstation locked up when KDM wasn’t even running, as I tried installing a different driver, so I suspected that the video drivers and X11 were not the issue involved.
However, I had also reached my limit of tolerance. I reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on both machines and have had no problems at all since. Yet, the laptop has yet to exhibit the same symptoms…
Though the laptop is using the open source drivers for it’s ATI video chip, it is running with Compiz and KDE4′s full effects and has no problem. I honestly don’t think this is an X issue.
What my mind keeps returning to is one factor: the CPU. Both of the desktop systems, with different motherboards, run AMD CPU’s. My laptop is running an Intel Mobile Pentium 4. I suspect that there is some nasty bug in the 2.6.28 kernel which doesn’t play well with AMD chips. Since I have nothing to go on in the logs and no kernel dumps to submit, I’m left waiting to see if the rest of the world runs into the same. Time will tell, I guess.
In the meantime, I’ll be patient. I can wait for KDE4, as attractive as it has become. Perhaps I’ll even try a different distribution with KDE4 included, to see if I have similar results – only this time I’ll do it on an AMD machine which is purely sacrificial.
I’ve been happy with Ubuntu, being Debian based, but allowing for real-world software at the same time. However, if I remain with the distribution it will be on a caveat: if I don’t have a couple of sacrificial machines to test on first, I’ll wait for the next LTS release.
I should have known better from the start. A 96 hour ordeal, I could have avoided.
P.S. For those that thing that 96 hours is a long time, bear in mind that the lockups were random and I was restoring my home directory and other partitions from backups as well between OS versions back and forth.
Did you record the strings of curse words that were most likely flying out of your mouth at a rate close to light speed. You come up with some pretty good ones whenever your working on comps.
There were a couple of moments that sent the dog to hide under the bed…