Sager NP9261 (D901C) - linux stability

Hi

I have a question for Sager NP9261 owners running Linux: is your system stable?

My NP9261 crashes constantly. I've tried 32 bit and 64 bit installs of Mandriva and Fedora, and neither seems to make much of a difference.

The only thing unique about my setup that I can think of is that I'm running a linux software RAID level 5 (which is unbelievably annoying when your system crashes constantly and usually needs to resync or reconstruct the RAID on reboot, leading to reboot times of up to 15 mins).

So I'd love someone to just say "I run Linux on the NP9261 and it never crashes". If it does crash, does the same happen in windows? I don't use windows.

Any other comments welcome. There is some info here: http://www.linuxlaptopwiki.net/wiki/Sager_NP9261, in the talk/discussion page you can see another user is having big issues with their wired/wireless networking.

Thanks.

 

Oh, I guess I should also mention what makes it crash. My completely random crashes seem to have diminished after fine tuning the wireless settings and being more heat conscious. My most recent crashes have all happened when using the card reader, or USB devices (printer/scanner, PDA, card reader), although often these devices work just fine. Any ideas?

 

I neither have a 9262 (yet) nor run linux, so feel free to ignore my unsolicited comment; however, I believe people have had luck with ubuntu linux on the 9262.

 

Hi,

I did not try linux yet. On windows never got a crash till now (app. 2 weeks of use), though my configuration is quite simple, no raid.

 

What kind of crash is it? Oops, kernel dump, userland, or what?

I can almost assure you that if this is an Oops you have a hardware problem. Run memtest overnight.

 

The system just freezes (I guess that's a better word). No info in /var/log/messages. Ran memtest overnight a while ago, all good. I should also note that with simple use (no USB, MMC, etc) I can usually get about a week and a half. Although sometimes the system will freeze even if I'm just scrolling down inside a webpage (i.e. completely randomly).

Thanks everyone for the comments so far.

 

Had crash with 9262,but that was with the drivers for game keys.Uninstalled it and no problems till as of today with gaming and everything else.

 

Sounds like it might be the video driver. That's about the only thing that has deep hooks into the kernelspace which could cause an unrecoverable hang.

Is your SysReq key enabled in the kernel?

 

Yeah, I have SysReq enabled, but the system doesn't pick it up. Amazingly, while waiting to see if I could do anything with the SysRq keys, I noticed the system wasn't completely 'frozen'. My Firefox windows grayed out, and came back, repeatedly. Perhaps even more amazing was that my screen dimmed after enough time had passed. Mouse was frozen, keyboard unresponsive, all CPU / memory meters frozen.

I also noticed the system sometimes loves to freeze shortly after a reboot (which makes the freezes even more annoying). I think your intuition about the video driver was right though, because I found some new lines in /var/log/messages (I guess because I waited so long before cold booting) which led me to some other nvidia users experiencing similar problems.

I was looking at http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=76805, but the NoAPG settings are irrelevant because I'm using PCI-X. And I don't have UseEvent turned on.

But now that I realized it could be video related, I found some advice on http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=58498 for dual-core processors. On my next crash I'll try booting with kernel options idle=poll and/or maxcpus=1. It also looks I might have some relief from acpi=off and/or noapic.

So I have a lot to try out now Fortunately sometimes the system will stay up for even a week between crashes, although I guess I could try some things which seem to make it crash more often. I also found some old libGL libraries which I have removed, and I guess its possible this was related to.

I'll post back when I know more.. thanks all for all the help so far.

 

Try noapic first. It's the most likely to help. And there are a couple of other options related to powersaving and video which escape me at the moment.

I presume you are using the nonfree video drivers.

 

Can't say I've had much luck. noapic, maxcpus=1 and idle=poll all failed to prevent the semi regular system freezes I've been experiencing. I tried noacpi briefly but the system ran very slowly and of course I've come to rely on a number of acpi features too. And yes, I'm using the binary nvidia drivers.

The latest thing I've been looking at is the wireless networking. My system freezes much more often at university, where I'm constantly connecting to different APs. Sometimes the system will freeze after a failed disassociation. And since it will try connect after a boot, this also explains freezes around that time. Yesterday I tried moving over to ndiswrapper with the WinXP binaries, but after trying to copy a big file over the network, the system froze again.

Of course, as mentioned before, I experience freezes generally during a lot of activity with e.g. card reader, USB devices (PDA, printer, card reader), etc. So could this be some kind of bus issue? I feel like I'm out of my league here

Quantumstate - thanks for all the help up until now.