screen & keyboard freeze mouse pointer may or may not freeze also
Submitted by KurtMerhoff
Assigned to Xorg Project Team
Description
I have several older systems of pre P4 vintage that have started to have
problems with some video cards that worked fine with older distros now freeze
or lock up to various degrees with newer distros using X.org. The problems
sound very similar in one or more ways to 2155, 2345, 2650, 3168, and 5331. The
freezes always happen while moving the mouse but seem more likely to occur when
moving or resizing windows and other changes to the screen, the larger the
change to the display the more chance of a lock-up. I have fixed it by using a
different video card on all systems where this occurs, but am unable to fix it
in that manner with a mini-atx based system with an on-the-board video card
since I don't have room to include a new video card on the PCI bus.
With this particular system the freeze is complete, including the mouse pointer. I have only been able to recover by using hardware reset button. This happens with both Gnome and KDE and I am able to ssh into the box and fiddle around with files. I did not attempt to restart X through ssh or do any serious trouble shooting. I have gotten it to work using Knoppix 4.02 which to my knowledge doesn't use X.org. I don't have much time to experiment with this but was encouraged by Stuart Kreitman at SCALE to file a report anyway. I'm not sure what other clues I might have at hand that may be of help, but here is the result of running lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: ALi Corporation M1621 (rev 04)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: ALi Corporation PCI to AGP Controller (rev 01)
0000:00:02.0 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:07.0 ISA bridge: ALi Corporation M1533 PCI to ISA Bridge [Aladdin IV]
(rev c3)
0000:00:0c.0 Multimedia audio controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CM8738 (rev
10)
0000:00:0e.0 Ethernet controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS900 PCI
Fast Ethernet (rev 02)
0000:00:0f.0 IDE interface: ALi Corporation M5229 IDE (rev c2)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV5 [Aladdin TNT2]
(rev 20)
If there is something you want me to try I may be willing to help, but it would require me to reinstall one of the distros that I have had problems with. In the spirit of the FOSS community it is something I would willing to do if it was a serious effort and might really help, but not just as a casual curiosity.