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I am completely new to Ubuntu I have an HP laptop compaq 6710b:

Specs: 
2GB ram
Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU T7250 @ 2.00GHz × 2
116GB HDD

There is 2GB swap partition which I presume that the OS setup during the default installation.

I have run an extensive hardware check through BIOS and everything passed.

I wiped and reformatted the HDD some time ago (it had a Windows XP installation before). I then did a clean installation of Ubuntu 16.04. It was running slow from the outset.

Yesterday I upgraded to 18.04

Today I did cold reboot:

These are times in mm:ss from the reboot so NOT actual clock time (it was about 11:20 clock time)

00:00 Power on
00:16 last screen from CMOS … blank purple screen appears
01:54 Ubuntu plus five dots on screen (first three are coloured in)
02:46 Username comes up .. I enter my pw
long period of inactivity with almost no HDD activity follows
05:18 Desktop is loaded and all seems well
05:37 Clicked settings  … long pause
06:44 settings dialogue appears
Repeatedly tried to run the resources utility but nothing happens

There is a journal dump available with lots of red lines, many of them referring to stuff like this:

 [drm:drm_atomic_helper_wait_for_flip_done [drm_kms_helper]] *ERROR* [CRTC:34:pipe A] flip_done timed out

11:20 Load chrome .. everything there working well with brisk page refreshes.
Closed

Opened Libre to write this note ..

Now I left it alone for about 20 minutes then attempted to load Firefox. This sent the HDD into a tailspin with the activity light constantly on. The system was completely unresponsive. After 15 minutes I get a pop-up dialogue offering me a force quit, but even when I clicked on the 'Force Quit' button, the system wouldn't respond, so eventually, I had to do a hard reset.

The same sequence of slow responsiveness repeated.

I have no idea what is causing this. Can anyone help me please?

efthialex
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Phil o'Macc
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    Since your specs are low I'll strongly recommend you to get out of GNOME and use a light weight desktop environment such as LXDE, Mate, XFCE, etc. – Kulfy Dec 03 '18 at 20:14
  • yes I was beginning to come round to this - many thanks for confirming this - very helpful. – Phil o'Macc Dec 03 '18 at 23:05

2 Answers2

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The drm_kms_helper issue seems to be a known issue:

Here you can find a potential workaround.

Like Kulfy commented, your specs do seem to be on the low side, barely making it onto the minimum requirements:

Ubuntu Desktop Edition

2 GHz dual core processor

2 GiB RAM (system memory)

You may want to go for a hardware upgrade (additional memory), or a software downgrade (switching to a different flavor--Lubuntu is a great alternative).

Aatlantise
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  • Many thanks for this advice; just what I needed. I will go forward and investigate some lighter OS as you suggest. many thanks for your time and good advice. – Phil o'Macc Dec 03 '18 at 23:04
  • Correction: Lubuntu isn't an environment. Lubuntu is an official flavor of Ubuntu which uses LXDE (now LXQt) as its environment though it can be installed using sudo apt install lubuntu-desktop – Kulfy Dec 03 '18 at 23:15
  • Thanks Kulfy for the pointer. I've edited my response. – Aatlantise Dec 04 '18 at 02:50
  • Installing a different flavor means formatting the partition/drive and reinstalling and setting up all again. Instead installing another desktop environment is sufficient since all flavors of Ubuntu differ only in their default desktop environment. – Kulfy Dec 04 '18 at 03:29
  • Hi it's me again So I have now installed lubuntu. Everything seems fine except that those drm_atomic_helper errors are still coming up at load but it's not slowing to a crawl and the environment seems quite lively so I'm happy BUT .... Problem is that there is no network manager in lubuntu 18.10 install and all attempts to install it have failed because ... that's right no internet! Not sure where to go as all answers I have found refer to earlier versions of lubuntu and don't seem to work with 18.10 – Phil o'Macc Dec 04 '18 at 10:39
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See Ubuntu server 18.04 slow boot due to drm_kms_helper

Your hardware should be fine. I'm also running 18.04 with the same CPU with the same RAM. ( Mine is a 2008 MacBook.) It took 3-4 minutes to boot and forever to start Firefox, System Settings, & etc until I applied the quick & easy workaround linked to above. Now it takes about 30 seconds, and the system runs very responsively overall, as well.

As I noted in the link above, a fix was also incorporated into operating system updates in late January 2019.

Ohiostandard
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