[ltp] XFree86 locking and crashing on T40 with RedHat 9.0

Neil Weisenfeld linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
16 Jul 2003 19:22:24 -0400


Several people (myself included) have had random X crashes attributed to
bad memory shipped with their T40's.  I'd suggest running memtest86 from
www.memtest86.com just to be sure.  I was going crazy with kernel
compile crashes, X crashes, the clock applet crashing, etc., etc.  A
replacement memory module from IBM did the trick.

This was not a transient problem in that I never had Memtest86 make it
through a pass without a lot of errors cropping up somewhere in the mix
and related to the second 512MB module.  If memtest comes up clean, then
you should look elsewhere.  Certainly make sure that you have the latest
errata kernel from RedHat.  What shipped originally w/ 9.0 was not
ideal.



Regards,
Neil  


On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 19:39, otisg wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have a T40 (one of those Centrino TPs) with RedHat 9.0 on it
> (not sure what the exact kernel version is, I am not on that
> machine now, but it's one of the 2.4 kernels, maybe 2.4-18 or
> -19 or some such).
> 
> I have 2 big problems with Linux on this machine.
> 
> 1. X sometimes locks up.  I can't even ALT-Backspace out of
> XFree86.  I have to reboot the whole machine.  This seems to
> happen randomly.
> I have noticed that the little CAPS LOCK status light at the
> bottom of the LCD starts blinking every time X locks up like
> this.
> 
> 2. X sometimes just crashes randomly.  This sucks, but at least
> that doesn't require a reboot.  I can't check which version of
> XFree86 this is, but it s whichever version ships with RH 9.0.
> 
> Has anyone seen this on their T40s or similar ThinkPads?
> Has anyone been able to solve these problems?
> 
> I use this TP for work, and this is decreasing my productivity,
> and is very annoying, as you can imagine. :(
> 
> Thank you,
> Otis
> 
> 
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