Freezing Games 18.04.1

Question

I'm not certain if this is a hardware problem or an Ubuntu problem but I'm asking here in case it's an issue someone else has dealt with:

I have a Dell Latitude E6420 laptop running Ubuntu 18.04.1 and it will often freeze when running graphical applications. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and sometimes DosBox are examples of programs that are sometimes running when things just lock up and a hard reboot is the only thing I can do. The only clue at all is that the mouse can still move sometimes but it can't interact with anything.

For all you experts, where do I start to begin solving this problem? What do I look for in the logs? How do I rule out a hardware issue? If this is too vague please delete the post and I'm sorry, but I don't know where to ask this one.

Okay so the last error message after hard rebooting is this every time it happens:

nouveau 0000:01:00.0: INTR 00800000

Edit: Anybody? Even the smallest clue would be nice. I am pretty tech savvy and can do some digging if I could figure out where to start looking.

This could be a low memory issue actually. How much memory does your machine have? — Tooniis, Aug 07 '19 at 15:00

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 06 '19 at 10:33

1

Your NVIDIA graphics chip is using nouveau driver. It lacks features and stability compared to NVIDIA's official driver. You should install NVIDIA's driver. It can be installed from "Additional Drivers" tab in Software & Updates.

answered Jan 06 '19 at 10:33

SurvivalMachine

2,783

Is there another option? The nvidia drivers caused me more problems than they solved last time I messed with them. I'd rather get to the bottom of the issue and fix it specifically. – some_guy632 Jan 06 '19 at 11:15
Error when using Xorg-session too? – nobody Aug 02 '19 at 14:31

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 03 '19 at 16:08

Your laptop appears to be about 7 years old. As such a newer kernel probably won't fix the glitch. I found 3 similar bug reports for your machine:

This will get you started on research. Basically we need to uncover more details about what errors proceeded the last error message quoted in your question.

Within Ask Ubuntu there are questions and answers specific to your machine that might be helpful:

Things you can try (After thoroughly researching all else):

2 Ways to Install Nvidia Driver on Ubuntu 18.04 (GUI & Command Line)
Switching to Ubuntu 16.04: How to roll back Ubuntu to a previous version?

Chose this one because it gave me the tools even though I no longer have the laptop. — some_guy632, Aug 09 '19 at 02:46

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Aug 03 '19 at 06:36

Here's a clue: Oibaf provides updated X (2D) and mesa (3D) free graphics drivers for radeon, intel and nvidia hardware. Try enabling and upgrading the open-source graphics drivers for Intel, AMD Radeon, and Nouveau (NVIDIA) with Oibaf's Graphics Drivers PPA.

I have had some video performance issues with Ubuntu's out-of-the-box drivers and Oibaf's Graphics Drivers have improved performance.

It might not resolve the problem (entirely), but it could be a milestone in the path towards a solution.

In terminal:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 03 '19 at 06:54

Check what you have with

inxi -G

Try this and then reboot:

sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

Others subcommands (ubuntu-drivers -h):

list: Show all driver packages which apply to the current system.
devices: Show all devices which need drivers, and which packages apply to them.
install: Install drivers that are appropriate for your hardware.
debug: Print all available information and debug data about drivers.

Possible duplicate

Freezing Games 18.04.1

4 Answers4