I am experiencing occasional system freezes in Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) on-
a Shuttle ST20G5 with an Athlon (Venice) CPU and ATI Xpress 200
chipset. It happens in X only -- the entire screen goes white and the
computer does not respond any more to anything but power-cycle. I had
the same issue in Breezy, then switched to Gentoo 2006.0 where
everything worked fine, and now that I'm back to Ubuntu with Dapper, I
see the issue is still there. It usually happens within an hour,
especially once I start up Firefox and/or Thunderbird. There are no
messages on the screen (at least those that are visible in X) or
kernel logs, the kernel crashes that hard.
I've had this happen with open-source Radeon driver on Dapper and
ATI's fglrx drivers and the generic VESA on Breezy, so it doesn't look
like the problem is in the graphics driver. As I already mentioned,
this did not happen on Gentoo (both 2.6.15 and 2.6.16 kernels) nor on
Windows XP sp2 (dual-boot), and I haven't found any memory errors
using memtest. I would be happy to do any further investigation that
would help in narrowing down the problem, but am at a loss at where to
even start, so I'll submit my system's details here and I hope someone
can tell me if there is anything I can do to either narrow down the
source of the problem or capture more details about the crash.
Davor