KDE 3.1.4, nVidia and crashing like brick

bakreule

I'm getting really weird errors now and I'm completely out of ideas so I'd thought I'd turn here so see if anyone was having similiar problems or can offer advice.

Within the past week I've done some upgrading, including the latest nvidia drivers (I have an old viper 770), KDE 3.1.4, and 2.6.0-test5 just to see what it's like. I'm posting this here because my only guess as to the problem is a nVidia/KDE problem. I'm probably wrong tho.

A few days ago, while playing in 2.6.0, my computer just locked up without warning. Mouse didn't move, KDE was dead, and the kernel didn't respond to Ctrl-Alt-F#. I waited, but eventually had to do a hard reset. This didn't worry me because 2.6.0 still is in beta. This kept on repeating though, and started repeating predictably, ie. just after KDE was done initializing and restoring my environment.

Sometimes it just locks up like a clam (sometimes with the blinking numlock and capslock), and sometimes it saves me the trouble and just reboots itself.

I tried going back to 2.4.22 but I've started receiving the exact same problems in 2.4.22.

I've started rolling back what I've installed to isolate the problem, starting with downgrading NVIDIA to 4363. Same problems though. I was about to downgrade KDE, but I wanted to check here before I lost a few hours of compile time.

I've checked my syslogs and the only thing out of the ordinary was xfs complaining about some font directories being unreadable. I checked this out and the directories weren't there. I emerged some fonts and commment out some others and xfs no longer complains, but I still have the same reboot/lockup problem.

The only other recent thing I've done is hack /etc/init.d/modules. To load a module in 2.6.0, you need the module-init-tools, which has a different copy of rmmod, insmod, etc. So my hack checks the kernel version and creates links to the appropriate executables and proceeds to load up the modules. By the way, is there a cleaner way to do this?

When the software checks out, one must check the hardware, and I'm starting to think I've got some faulty ram, mobo, etc. This really scares me because it's a bitch to debug and can be expensive. The only consolation is that I run very fine in Win2K server, playing games, checking email, etc without a problem.

ANY help/thoughts/suggestions are appreciated.

naseweis · Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2003 1:28 pm Post subject:

You didn't need to hack your modules stuff.
module-init-tools work fine with 2.4. It's the other way round that would cause you problems.
Also note that if you build your nvidia drivers by hand, you want to have two copies of the sources. One for 2.4 and one for 2.6 with 2.6-patches applied.
_________________
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bakreule · Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2003 3:57 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the mod tools tip. And yes, of course, I've got the 2.6 version and the 2.4 version compiled fine. Any thoughts as to what is causing these mystery crashes and reboots though?

I just remembered that it's probably a good idea to list my hardware:
Asus A7N8X-X
512MB 3200 DDR
Athlon XP 2600
various other crap...

Thanks again!

bakreule · Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2003 3:57 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the mod tools tip. And yes, of course, I've got the 2.6 version and the 2.4 version compiled fine. Any thoughts as to what is causing these mystery crashes and reboots though?

I just remembered that it's probably a good idea to list my hardware:
Asus A7N8X-X
512MB 3200 DDR
Athlon XP 2600
various other crap...

Thanks again!

bakreule · Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2003 3:57 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the mod tools tip. And yes, of course, I've got the 2.6 version and the 2.4 version compiled fine. Any thoughts as to what is causing these mystery crashes and reboots though?

I just remembered that it's probably a good idea to list my hardware:
Asus A7N8X-X
512MB 3200 DDR
Athlon XP 2600
various other crap...

Thanks again!

bakreule · Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2003 3:58 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the mod tools tip. And yes, of course, I've got the 2.6 version and the 2.4 version compiled fine. Any thoughts as to what is causing these mystery crashes and reboots though?

I just remembered that it's probably a good idea to list my hardware:
Asus A7N8X-X
512MB 3200 DDR
Athlon XP 2600
various other crap...

Thanks again!

bakreule · Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2003 3:59 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the mod tools tip. And yes, of course, I've got the 2.6 version and the 2.4 version compiled fine. Any thoughts as to what is causing these mystery crashes and reboots though?

I just remembered that it's probably a good idea to list my hardware:
Asus A7N8X-X
512MB 3200 DDR
Athlon XP 2600
various other crap...

Thanks again!

bakreule · Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2003 3:59 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the mod tools tip. And yes, of course, I've got the 2.6 version and the 2.4 version compiled fine. Any thoughts as to what is causing these mystery crashes and reboots though?

I just remembered that it's probably a good idea to list my hardware:
Asus A7N8X-X
512MB 3200 DDR
Athlon XP 2600
various other crap...

Thanks again!

bakreule · Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2003 3:59 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the mod tools tip. And yes, of course, I've got the 2.6 version and the 2.4 version compiled fine. Any thoughts as to what is causing these mystery crashes and reboots though?

I just remembered that it's probably a good idea to list my hardware:
Asus A7N8X-X
512MB 3200 DDR
Athlon XP 2600
various other crap...

Thanks again!