[SOLVED] Mageia hangs, apparently at random.

[mla]

Now that I am trying to use Mageia as my main desktop OS, I see it hanging fairly frequently and apparently at random. At least, there is no immediately obvious commonality to those hangs. E.g. the last session yesterday night went like this:

1. Boot Mageia
2. Login as a non-privileged KDE user.
3. Start Konsole and list a file using cat.
4. Start firefox and access a web-page out there (http://www.theregister.co.uk)
5. Use the mouse wheel to scroll through the web page.
6. Part-way through scrolling the system hangs. Mouse cursor still moving about, but all else is dead. Can't even switch to the system console via Ctrl-Alt-F1.
7. Pull the power plug and go to bed.

Anybody else seeing such problems? What details should I report on Bugzilla?

FWIW, I have Mandriva 2010.2 dual-booting on the same machine, and that's rock solid.

[dethadol]

I suffer from what sounds like the same problem.

Funnily although the screen is frozen keyboard input still works, I can see this by hitting Ctrl-Esc, This (still) brings up the system monitor and when I close that with the mouse everything is back to normal and I can see that any key presses made after the screen froze have registered.

I have always assumed that this problem relates to my NVidia graphics driver, but I don't really know. Until I discovered the Ctr-Esc trick I had to switch off the power to get thins going again.

[mla]

Well, yes, I have NVidia graphics -- GeForce GT 220. One expects to be pretty safe on Linux with NVidia. What's yours?

Thanks for the Ctrl-Esc tip. I'll try that.

[mla]

Well, it turns out that Mageia does not install NVidia drivers by default, which Mandriva does -- on machines with NVidia graphics, anyway. That certainly resolved another problem (Minecraft crashing), and may well cure the hangs. Change to root and

urpmi x11-driver-video-nvidia-current

Yuo may also need to modify the grub menu.lst to add the nokmsboot to the kernel boot options. I had to do it manually and without it the boot hung.

[martinw]

I have seen the same problem, but not for a while. Do you have a fully updated system?

[mla]

Yes, it's a fully updated system. Except that it always tells me I cannot select kipi-plugins-expoblending-1.9.0-3.1.mga1.x86_64 -- not that I particularly want to do so.

And yes, I can confirm that installing NVidia drivers gets rid of the random hangs too.I've been Mageia for several hours today with no trouble. prior to the driver installation it never lasted beyond half an hour.

[doktor5000]

Well, it turns out that Mageia does not install NVidia drivers by default, which Mandriva does -- on machines with NVidia graphics, anyway. That certainly resolved another problem (Minecraft crashing), and may well cure the hangs. Change to root and

urpmi x11-driver-video-nvidia-current

That's not the proper way to do this. Please run drakx11 as root and select your graphics card,
then answer yes for the question about the proprietary driver.

[mla]

As a matter of fact, I did that through the X11 config (via the control centre, rather than by running drakx11 directly) and it already had NVidia selected as "GeForce6100 to GeForce 360". (As an aside, it is not intuitively obvious that this covers my GT 220, which apparently it does.) And I went to "options" and clicked on OK, clicked on test and fiddled about. At no stage was I offered to have NVidia driver installed.

So maybe I did not in the end do it the "approved" way, but I did do it the way that actually worked. It was only after I installed the NVidia package manually that I got asked whether I wanted to use a non-free driver that was available. Until that -- nix.

[doktor5000]

As a matter of fact, I did that through the X11 config (via the control centre, rather than by running drakx11 directly) and it already had NVidia selected as "GeForce6100 to GeForce 360". (As an aside, it is not intuitively obvious that this covers my GT 220, which apparently it does.) And I went to "options" and clicked on OK, clicked on test and fiddled about. At no stage was I offered to have NVidia driver installed.

So maybe I did not in the end do it the "approved" way, but I did do it the way that actually worked. It was only after I installed the NVidia package manually that I got asked whether I wanted to use a non-free driver that was available. Until that -- nix.

Normally, your card is always displayed this way. You really need to select it again, and answer yes to the question.
And you will always get asked that, also before installing the driver, if done that way. Only clicking options is not enough.

But, yes, you're right, in the end it's important that it works for you

BTW: "GeForce6100 to GeForce 360" means Geforce 6100 series to GeForce GT 360" which covers your Geforce GT 220

[mla]

OK, but why didn't that get offered during the installation, when the system correctly identified my graphics card as NVidia?

[doktor5000]

During the initial installation of Mageia? Because those drivers are not contained in the FreeDVD, maybe?

/note to self: add MAQeia for Nvidia and Nouveau

[mla]

I must be missing something... If it's OK to ask whether one wants a non-free driver used after the installation, why is it not OK to ask the same question *during* the installation? (Yeah, OK... in the post-install phase, probably). As it is the result is deeply confusing: NVidia is correctly detected (and set as the graphics card), but no driver for it installed or offered. The result, "out of box" is a system that keeps hanging. I nearly gave up on Mageia as the result, because the procedure you offer as the correct one could hardly be described as intuitively obvious.

[doktor5000]

I nearly gave up on Mageia as the result, because the procedure you offer as the correct one could hardly be described as intuitively obvious.

Well, from that POV, you have a valid point there.

[PiElle]

First post!
I installed Mageia two weeks ago.
Everything worked right out of the box.
In my opinion, the procedure to install the Nvidia proprietary driver is very easy and intuitive, especially if you compare it with other primary Distros (like, for instance, Fedora or Opensuse): in fact, it only requires a pair of clicks in MCC!
Incidentally: I also encountered the problem described in this discussion (system randomly freezing), but it was perfectly solved once I installed the proprietary driver (I had the same issue running Kubuntu 11.04 with the same hardware: notebook Acer TM 8572TG).
All's well that ends well!

[mla]

A Mageia user is most likely to be comparing the installation experience with that of Mandriva, not of any other Linux distro. There is a good reason why I settled on Mandrake/Mandriva many moons ago now.

And it makes no difference how many clicks it takes. As the old joke has it, the charge of $100 is for knowing where to kick.