F10 Crash on laptop Radeon 200M

[Richard England]

Christopher A. Williams wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-11-29 at 11:44 -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>   
>> On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 12:02:13 -0500,
>>   Wade Hampton <wadehamptoniv at gmail.com> wrote:
>>     
>>> Finally upgraded my Gateway laptop with ATI Radeon Express 200M video
>>> to Fedora 10.  The computer now only stays up for a few minutes when X
>>> is running, then locks up -- no keyboard, mouse, and display freezes.
>>> I am not sure if I can ssh to it (not yet tested).  This is my wife's
>>> laptop and has been running Fedora 6 and was VERY stable for several
>>> years....  Wife is not very happy at this point.  Note, I reported
>>> this to RedHat bugzilla (and D. Jones at Redhat already had opened a
>>> bug on this some time ago).
>>>
>>> I also tried to get the non-free driver working but it won't build
>>> with Fedora 10 yet.
>>>
>>> Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this problem (this was sent
>>> from XP on the same laptop),
>>>       
>> It's probably worth disabling modesetting to see if that fixes the problem.
>> Either way a bug report is a good idea.
>>
>>     
> Ironically, as I was reading this thread, this exact thing happened to
> me! X just totally froze up on my desktop. No keyboard, no mouse.
> Nothing.
>
> I did notice that the system clock at the top was still ticking seconds
> away. Boy am I glad I changed _that_ setting. :) Otherwise I would have
> thought the system was totally frozen.
>
> I was able to use my laptop (also running F10) to ssh to the afflicted
> desktop machine and reboot it from there.
>
> I don't think this particular problem is a driver issue with ATI. My
> desktop is currently running the RPMFusion nVidia drivers on a GeForce
> 7100 chip set. This more likely has to be X or some other related
> component.
>
> Since you already created it, let us know the Bugzilla number and I'll
> add my info to it.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Chris
>
>   
Several releases ago there were interactions with one of the screen 
savers.  I encountered this on a desk top with an nvidia card and 
disabled the more advance (complicated and visually interesting) 
versions and the problem went away.  I found that I could use the 
"blank" screen saver with out a problem. 

I've _not_ encountered this in F10 but it might be worth taking a look 
at the screensavers.  Sorry I don't have any more details.

~~R