Dell latitude D630 hangs

Hi,
I have Dell Latitude D630 Laptop.
I have installed Ubuntu 8.04 Linux on it with 2.6.24-23-generic
I am facing one problem. It hangs all of sudden.
Lights on right-top corner with ([A] and [Down_Arrow] sign starts blinking) after it hangs.
I tried searching manual for the information on this indicators but could not find anything useful
Can anyone tell me whats wrong with my laptop ?

 

When you say "it hangs all of a sudden" do you mean that this problem occurs after you logged into ubuntu or before it? Did this happen everytime you work your system ? Please give us detailed configuration of the system. Do you run other OS in your system, if so does this problem occurs under their run ?

 

I am not sure what triggers this, but it is happening
almost everytime I logged into the system.
Other OS on the laptop is Windows, but I dont boot into it.
I tried booting into it but this problem did not show up even after
1 hour of conitnuos use.
If u know, could you please tell me meaning of those indicators on
right top of D630 Laptop.

 

It may be a Linux kernel panic. When a Linux computer enters into a kernel panic state, it can exhibit as a system lockup, (nothing responds except powering the computer off), with a blinking Caps Lock indicator.

As to what may be causing it, the culprit is usually hardware, and it can be lots of things. Without installing tools to see the kernel memory dump when the system panics, it's difficult to say what's causing the problem. You can try removing, or removing the drivers for, specific hardware in your laptop, until you see your laptop is no longer having the kernel panic.

I recently debugged a kernel panic I was having on 2 different laptops, as being related to this bug with the Intel 4965 WiFi hardware and a specific Intel 4965 microcode version. The way I was able to determine it was the Intel WiFi hardware, was to remove the driver from my system, and see if the laptop would not panic anymore and it stopped. This problem was specific to the iwlwifi-4965-ucode-228.57.1.21 version of the microcode, and the person reporting the bug stated that downgrading to the earlier iwlwifi-4965-ucode-4.44.1.20 microcode solved this problem. There has also been an update to the microcode, iwlwifi-4965-ucode-228.57.2.23, which fixed the panic problem for me.

If you have Intel WiFi hardware in your laptop, the easiest thing to try to see if this is your problem, is to remove the driver for your WiFi hardware, and then reboot. If your system stops panicing, then one way to try and fix this problem, is to get the latest version of the driver/microcode installed. With most packaged distros like Ubuntu, this means install the latest version of Ubuntu that you can get, even if it's alpha/beta. If that doesn't fix the problem then you're going to need some Ubuntu specific instructions on manually upgrading, or as a second choice, downgrading, the Intel microcode.

Good Luck..