# strange laptop problem

## munk

Hello, I am experiencing a very strange problem on my laptop. I'm dual booting windows and linux. Windows boots and runs fine however whenever i boot into linux fluxbox loads fine then after a few seconds the scroll lock and caps lock lights start to flash and nothing responds. Occasionally even the power key wont work and I will have to wait until it runs out of battery power so that it switches itself off! I'm not sure why this has started to happen since everything was working fine before. I also dont think its a hardware problem since windows runs as normal. 

Does anyone have any ideas short of a complete reinstall?

Thanks in advance

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## nightcanton

Have you tried any others...like blackbox...or Gnome...?

Just to see if it still happens.

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## munk

I just tried blackbox and it never happened. However, when i tried to run konsole the system rebooted. I tried it again and the same thing happened. I also tried to run galeon and it segfaulted.

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## azlan

I would check dmesg and then see if there are any messages that will help.

	My first thought is that something is incongruent in the bios.

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## nightcanton

Post your 

 *Quote:*   

> dmesg
> 
> 

 

and tell us what type of laptop you have....also check your power settings in the kernel

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## Praxxus

 *munk wrote:*   

>  the scroll lock and caps lock lights start to flash and nothing responds. 

 

That's a kernel barf. I had a similar problem on a VAIO laptop that I Gentoo'd this week.  It would freeze up (complete with flashing lights) as soon as I tried to log out of KDE.  EVERY time.

I recompiled the kernel and disabled DRI, and that seems to have fixed it.

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## munk

Here is my dmesg. I looked through it and never saw anything that may be relevant but i'll post it anyway. 

```

Linux version 2.4.20-ck6 (root@laptop) (gcc version 3.2.2) #4 Tue May 6 17:46:07 BST 2003

BIOS-provided physical RAM map:

 BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)

 BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)

 BIOS-e820: 00000000000e8000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)

 BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 0000000005ff0000 (usable)

 BIOS-e820: 0000000005ff0000 - 0000000005ff8000 (ACPI data)

 BIOS-e820: 0000000005ff8000 - 0000000006000000 (ACPI NVS)

 BIOS-e820: 00000000ffef0000 - 00000000fff00000 (reserved)

 BIOS-e820: 00000000ffff0000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)

95MB LOWMEM available.

On node 0 totalpages: 24560

zone(0): 4096 pages.

zone(1): 20464 pages.

zone(2): 0 pages.

Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=linux ro root=302

Initializing CPU#0

Detected 997.552 MHz processor.

Console: colour VGA+ 80x25

Calibrating delay loop... 1985.74 BogoMIPS

Memory: 93368k/98240k available (2428k kernel code, 4484k reserved, 644k data, 116k init, 0k highmem)

Dentry cache hash table entries: 16384 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)

Inode cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)

Mount-cache hash table entries: 2048 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)

Buffer-cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)

Page-cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)

CPU: L1 I cache: 16K, L1 D cache: 16K

CPU: L2 cache: 256K

CPU:     After generic, caps: 0383f9ff 00000000 00000000 00000000

CPU:             Common caps: 0383f9ff 00000000 00000000 00000000

CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(TM) CPU                1000MHz stepping 01

Enabling fast FPU save and restore... done.

Enabling unmasked SIMD FPU exception support... done.

Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.

POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX

PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfdb31, last bus=1

PCI: Using configuration type 1

PCI: Probing PCI hardware

PCI: Probing PCI hardware (bus 00)

PCI: Using IRQ router SIS [1039/0008] at 00:01.0

PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:03.0

PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 00:01.4

isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...

isapnp: No Plug & Play device found

Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4

Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039

Initializing RT netlink socket

Starting kswapd

Journalled Block Device driver loaded

devfs: v1.12c (20020818) Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)

devfs: boot_options: 0x1

Installing knfsd (copyright (C) 1996 okir@monad.swb.de).

NTFS driver v1.1.22 [Flags: R/O]

SGI XFS snapshot-xfs-2.4.20-2003-04-07_05:19_UTC with ACLs, no debug enabled

SGI XFS Quota Management subsystem

parport0: PC-style at 0x378 (0x778) [PCSPP(,...)]

parport0: irq 7 detected

pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured

Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with MANY_PORTS SHARE_IRQ SERIAL_PCI ISAPNP enabled

ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A

ttyS01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 8250

PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:01.6

PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 00:01.1

Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31

ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx

SIS5513: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 01

SIS5513: chipset revision 208

SIS5513: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later

SiS630

    ide0: BM-DMA at 0xff00-0xff07, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA

    ide1: BM-DMA at 0xff08-0xff0f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA

hda: FUJITSU MHN2200AT, ATA DISK drive

hdd: CD-224E, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14

ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15

blk: queue c0449fa4, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)

hda: 39070080 sectors (20004 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=2432/255/63, UDMA(33)

hdd: ATAPI 24X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache, UDMA(33)

Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12

Partition check:

 /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2 p3 p4

Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M

FDC 0 is a National Semiconductor PC87306

PPP generic driver version 2.4.2

PPP Deflate Compression module registered

PPP BSD Compression module registered

Linux agpgart interface v0.99 (c) Jeff Hartmann

agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 60M

agpgart: Detected SiS 630 chipset

agpgart: AGP aperture is 64M @ 0xe0000000

SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00

kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k scsi_hostadapter, errno = 2

Trident 4DWave/SiS 7018/ALi 5451,Tvia CyberPro 5050 PCI Audio, version 0.14.10h, 17:51:25 May  6 2003

PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:01.4

PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 00:03.0

trident: SiS 7018 PCI Audio found at IO 0xd400, IRQ 11

ac97_codec: AC97 Audio codec, id: ALG16(ALC200/200P)

ac97_codec: AC97 Modem codec, id: SIL34(Silicon Laboratory Si3036)

Linux Kernel Card Services 3.1.22

  options:  [pci] [cardbus] [pm]

PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:03.0

PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 00:01.4

usb.c: registered new driver hub

Yenta IRQ list 00b0, PCI irq11

Socket status: 30000007

uhci.c: USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver v1.1

Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...

usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage

USB Mass Storage support registered.

mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice

NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0

IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP

IP: routing cache hash table of 512 buckets, 4Kbytes

TCP: Hash tables configured (established 8192 bind 16384)

NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0.

FAT: bogus logical sector size 0

UMSDOS: msdos_read_super failed, mount aborted.

FAT: bogus logical sector size 0

FAT: bogus logical sector size 0

reiserfs: checking transaction log (device 03:02) ...

Warning, log replay starting on readonly filesystem

reiserfs: replayed 3 transactions in 1 seconds

Using r5 hash to sort names

ReiserFS version 3.6.25

VFS: Mounted root (reiserfs filesystem) readonly.

Mounted devfs on /dev

Freeing unused kernel memory: 116k freed

Adding Swap: 200804k swap-space (priority -1)

slmdm: version 2.7.9 Jan 26 2003 16:47:22 (Smart Link Ltd.).

slmdm: country set is 0xb5 (USA).

Smart Link AMRMO modem.

amrmo: probe 1039:7013 Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 56k Winmodem (Smart Link HAMR5600 compatible) : SiS630 card...

PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:01.6

PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 00:01.1

```

I have no DRI enabled in my kernel so I can't be that. It must be another kernel problem but I see no way of finding out the exact problem.

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## Praxxus

Try "stripping down" the kernel, and only running what you absolutely need.  Get rid of low latency, preemptible kernel, etc.

Also, I see in your dmesg output that you have both XFS and Reiserfs support.  Do you need both of those?  

You might try installing the vanilla-sources kernel, too, and see what that does for you.  It has fewer bells and whistles, but it might be less likely to fall over on flaky hardware.

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