KDE Freezes up

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Sunday 05 November 2006 10:56 pm, Howard Coles Jr. wrote:

> Nope.  Running everything as it came from the repos.  I run the ati driver.

Which one?  The free one that has broken 3D ("ati" I think), or the 
proprietary one ("fglrx" maybe)?

Not directly related, but I had all kinds of trouble with that proprietary 
driver on Debian Sid.  I got the system to such an incredibly screwed up 
state that I cut my losses and format/reinstalled for the first time since 
2001.  It was that bad.  I thought my computer was dead.  The timer was 
running 4X too fast, the screen was flashing at a frenetic rate in text mode.  
All because of that stupid proprietary ATI driver, and even rebooting to use 
the other one did not solve the problem.  I had to power the machine all the 
way off to make whatever that driver had done to it, some persistent bad 
hardware state, go away.

That was when I switched to Kubuntu, actually.  I decided to reinstall with 
Kubuntu, and try the whole "regular stable snapshot" idea on for size.  So 
far, so good, but I'm running Dapper, not Edgy.  I decided "LTS" sounded 
really good after that mess.  It really was quite bad, and I'm the kind of 
guy who has rebuilt a partition table from scratch, installed Debian from 
scratch onto a running Mandrake that was still running (and it booted, and 
worked!), and all kind of crazy extreme hacker things like that (mostly in my 
younger days, mind.)  I don't scare easily, and this scared me.

I don't know that I'm offering you any real advice here.  Just sympathy.  I 
hate ATI.  I will NEVER buy ATI again.

-- 
D. Michael McIntyre 

Author of Rosegarden Companion http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/
See my new music stand unfolding at http://users.adelphia.net/~silvan/