Hi,
I upgraded from Debian etch to lenny over a week ago. Shortly thereafter,
my system's display started freezing after a few minutes of use: the only
thing that does not get affected is the cursor in X; I couldn't even get to a
virtual console. But I could shut it down by pressing the power button (which
seems to be equivalent to running "shutdown -h now"). I uninstalled all xorg
drivers, except for vesa; this seems to keep my system stable, but I still get
the freezing sometimes when I shutdown from within X. (Quick summary of that
oddness: *everything* in X freezes, except for the cursor; and I can't do
*anything*, not even get to a virtual console, except for shut down (*NOT* a
hard reset) by pressing the power button on my box.)
Now things start resembling Steven King's 1408. I installed Antix Mepis,
because it describes itself as a distro for old hardware, and I assumed that I
had found a bug in the nv xorg driver (I'm using an old (it's for AGP) nVidia
card) that would be patched in a distro for old hardware. After going through
the installation process and configuring my new system, it froze, just as
before, while Synaptic was getting the repository indexes.
So I went back to etch. A *FRESH INSTALLATION* of etch. And it froze...
while Synaptic was getting the repository induces.
All of this was much, much more painful than it sounds. I'm *now* using
Debian lenny with the vesa driver. I *was* using Debian etch with nVidia's
non-free driver, and it was very stable.
Does anybody have any advice? Please? I'm now thinking (after etch froze)
that something has happened to my video card. And I'm a little worried that
it will get worse.
Oh, yeah, and a while ago when I was using etch, some characters (it looks
like it's always the same ones) on the screen during boot time (when it's in
plain vga mode) would turn into a vertical bar character (this -> '|'). It
still happens, and to more characters than when it started (i.e. it's gotten
worse). So, again, taking all of this into consideration, I think my video
card is on its way out, and needs to be replaced.
Thanks,
Aidan
- my video card is possessed Aidan Gauland
-
