GNome hang

[Peter J. Stieber]

PS = Pete Stieber
PS>> I opened the case to confirm the graphics card type
PS>> (ATI 9250 / 128 MB DDR TV-out DVI 64-bit).  When I
PS>> did this I noticed the fan attached to the heat sink
PS>> was frozen.
PS>>
PS>> My new guess is the card would overheat when the X
PS>> server started.
PS>>
PS>> Does this seam reasonable?

T = Tim
T> That's quite likely.  Or, it might work until you
T> did something graphically intensive, then fail.
T> I've certainly come across the latter.
T>
T> I now own a fairly good NVidia graphics card thanks
T> to a failed fan.  It belonged to a friend who's
T> computer would die after a while, and he didn't
T> bother to find out why until I goaded him.  In a
T> typical Windows user fashion, he just rebooted and
T> re-installed repeatedly, hoping that would magically
T> solve his crashes.  Pulling the PC apart, we found a
T> seized fan.
T>
T> Faced with having to spend a silly amount of money
T> for a fan that would fit onto the card, or a similar
T> amount to buy a new and better card, or jury-rigging
T> an extra fan into his case.  He bought a new card,
T> and gave me the old one.  I just sat an ordinary
T> computer case fan next to the card to cool it, and
T> it runs fine.  In fact, this fan cools the whole
T> card, and cools it better than the piddly little
T> fan that came with the card.

Thanks for the info Tim.  You may have missed my last post.  A friend 
related a story about a noisy fan on a MB support chip.  When he posted 
the problem and mentioned the MB model someone else mentioned they had 
the same MB, but their support chip just had the heat sink.  He simply 
removed the fan and it worked.

To test this theory for the graphics card we removed the fan, opened the 
case, and pointed a fan directly at the card.  The card x server still 
froze.  The heat sink that was under the fan was *not* hot to the touch.

I dropped back to the standard VESA VGA X driver.  It worked.  It even 
worked with screen savers and OpenGL applications.

I'm wondering if I should I post a fedora bugzilla report for the ATI 
driver?

The card freezes when I use xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.7.197-1.fc8.  Considering 
the fan problem, my bugzilla report may get ignored.  I don't see 
similar complaints in the red hat bugzilla database.

I'm waiting for a new ATI card.  I'm not sure if it has the same ATI 
chip.  If it does and exhibits the same problem, I'll definitely make a 
bug report.

Any ideas welcome.
Pete