Hey, thanks for your responses.
@Gan Lu: ATI canceled support for the proprietary driver for X1400. Using the vesa driver won't work because gnome shell requires hardware acceleration.
@Simon: Actually I will try killing gnome-shell next time. I always killed gnome-session or the xserver. or simply stopped gdm. We seem to have different problem though. I use CTRL+ALT+{UP,DOWN} quite a lot and it never hung up when switching between workspaces.
@Roman: Doing vmstat 2 > vmstat.log & now. Actually I don't know what to do with the information after a crash but it will provide more insight.
If anybody else experiences similar problems, please comment.
On 03.11.2011 12:38, Roman V.Leon. wrote:
Dear arch users and developers,
I have posted this issue also in the archlinux forum [1]. I didn't get much feedback there. So I'm hoping some people here might have an idea of how to resolve the problem.
Problem: gnome shell freezes from time to time (actually daily).
Freezing: "Freezing" means, the screen becomes unresponsive but everything seems to continue working (sound and videos continue playing; even the mouse pointer can still be moved). Most of the time I'm able to switch to a virtual console although sometimes it takes 10-20 seconds after CTRL+ALT+F1 to show up. Then, however, everything is running smoothly. It's not possible to restart X since it will freeze again at the gdm login screen, or even without using gdm when loading the desktop.
What triggers the problem: Usually it happens while scrolling on websites or pdfs. I feel like it happens more often if there are large images.
Hardware: IBM T60 ATI X1400
I think it's an issue with the open source radeon drivers. However, this problem doesn't occur using other desktop environments. I tried to look into some log files but I couldn't find noticeable error messages.
Looking forward to your suggestions, Max
Hi Max. Try to use system diagnostics tools like `vmstat 2`(2 is a timeout) for example, probably you will find the key to resolve you problem. By the way did you fill /etc/hosts with your PC's hostname ?
Max, i have ASUS F3Ke laptop with ATI X2300 and i do not have such problems with xf86-video-ati driver, but if be honest i'm a kde user. Try to compare vmstat output when system behavior is normal and when it's freezes and post it here if there will be any difference. -- Cheers, Roman V.Leon.