Any fellow Linux users on here?

[Outdated]

Meanwhile Microsoft insists everyone buy new computers to accommodate their OS. Would be amusing if those corporations would begin to migrate to Windows, though I suppose so many of them are contractually married to Microsoft.

Some of the large mining corporations here are still using WinXP.

 

[Judge]

Some of the large mining corporations here are still using WinXP.

LOL...yeah I believe that. Seen it myself in a few instances here over the years.

 

[Judge]

Two hours into using Firefox for the forum today and it again froze on me. Total lockup, had to reboot to get back.

Ran Memtest86+ to confirm my memory passed 100% with 0 errors.
Disks program indicates all SSD partitions are undamaged.

Turns out adding that blacklist of the Nouveau driver was a bad idea. I didn't notice until it was too late that there was apparently an automatic blacklist file the OS places whenever you upgrade from the Xorg-Nouveau driver to any of the Nvidia drivers. After I updated everything I ended up having to get back into the system using the recovery mode. But after deleting the blacklist file I made and updating initramfs once again, when I rebooted it just hung...and then when I tried using the recovery mode it never got there.

Probably doesn't matter. Whatever it is, the only major thing left is to reinstall without Secure Boot, hoping that is the culprit. Heartbreaking....as I really loved Mint up to now.

At least I have Pop!OS22.04 to fall back on....which continues to run just fine. Go figure. probably best to just stay on it for a bit to see if anything wonky happens. Funny, with Pop!OS if I have Secure Boot activated in the bios it won't even boot. Just left with a black screen. A pretty clear indicator that Secure Boot is a "no-no" to System76's Pop!OS22.04.

Supposedly early next year the latest version of Pop!OS "Cosmic" will debut. The alpha presentations look promising, but it's all in Rust and not Gnome. Not sure what to expect.

 

[Outdated]

I went through many different distros over the years and found quite a few that I liked but most of them only existed for a few years then were gone again. For the last 5 years I've been using the one I hated the most but it hasn't played up on me.

 

[Judge]

I went through many different distros over the years and found quite a few that I liked but most of them only existed for a few years then were gone again. For the last 5 years I've been using the one I hated the most but it hasn't played up on me.

The distros I probably pay the most attention to now are those offering Long Term Service. The ones you can count on to go the distance, which have been around for a very long time.

I suppose this limits me to just a few of them, but I'm ok with that. Small wonder I seem to gravitate towards Ubuntu & Debian based distros.

 

[tkcartoonist]

I've been doing some short reading on immutable distros. Anyone know much about those?

 

[Outdated]

I've been doing some short reading on immutable distros. Anyone know much about those?

The live desktop boot drives we use for installing Linux are all "immutable". It simply means nothing can be permanently changed. Every time you reboot it is reset to it's original state.

 

[Judge]

I've been doing some short reading on immutable distros. Anyone know much about those?

Here's one advertising specific distros. None I've ever installed though.

12 Future-Proof Immutable Linux Distributions

 

[Judge]

It's been three days since my system (Mint 22.0) locked up on me. Maybe today it will happen again, though in the past these "freezes" have remained somewhat random. Sadly the last one had nothing to say in the System Reports after I was forced to reboot. And this time I paid close attention to my log file, but to no avail either. It listed the unsolved issues, but not showed nothing new at the exact time the freeze happened.

In the meantime this time around, I've documented all the log issues and fixes I have done, plus a couple of other things which may or may not be relevant to the freezing issue which sadly seems more common than I once thought between Mint and Ubuntu.

* Turned off video acceleration in Firefox 130.2 (Known to crash sometimes)
* Have not yet installed Cinnamenu (Cinnamon Mini-Crashes?)
* Turned off Bluetooth Service (I get Bluetooth log errors with it on or off)
* Turned off Linux Mint 22.0 screensaver application (Unintended power lockups?)

Pop!OS continues to run fine, though I haven't really run it hours on end to verify it.

I'm anticipating my latest fixes to fail, leaving me with one last whopping "Hail Mary" to try. To formally upgrade the bios of my motherboard. -Risky business. One wrong move while attempting a BIOS upgrade and it can "brick" your computer.

 

[Judge]

Anyone here familiar with "Trim" technology? Designed to enhance SSD performance?

Never heard of it until now...having seen a YouTube video about how simple it is to install using the terminal. Just wondering if it really does enhance performance extend the life of an SSD. To "reclaim" space on unused blocks of a mounted drive.

Sounds like a good idea...

fstrim Command Examples in Linux – The Geek Diary

Using the following to determine if it will work with your computer:

sudo fstrim -v/

 

[tkcartoonist]

I read a bit of an article where someone got Debian to boot on an Intel 4004 processor.

 

[Princess Viola]

i just learned that nvidia has been artificially limiting power draws on laptops running linux

my GPU is rated for 140 watts at max

it was capped at 80 watts on linux

i enabled that dynamic boost or whatever so now it can go up to 105 watts and apparently 40 series GPUs (which is what i have, i have an RTX 4050, offer diminishing returns in terms of performance over 90 watts)

but still ARGH.

 

[tkcartoonist]

I've had a grudge against nVidia since 2003, and I guess that's not going away any time soon.

 

[Judge]

i just learned that nvidia has been artificially limiting power draws on laptops running linux

my GPU is rated for 140 watts at max

it was capped at 80 watts on linux

i enabled that dynamic boost or whatever so now it can go up to 105 watts and apparently 40 series GPUs (which is what i have, i have an RTX 4050, offer diminishing returns in terms of performance over 90 watts)

but still ARGH.

Yeah, leaves a bad taste in my mouth just reading about such things.

Nvidia's TDP values for the RTX 4050, 4060 and 4070 Laptop do not matter for gaming

But then I'm not very happy with Nvidia either, having spent two to three months attempting to track down why Linux Mint 22 is randomly freezing anywhere from three hours to three day or more. Most suspicions involve Nvidia drivers, but I have yet to find a solution that truly works.

I recently rolled back to the oldest driver, and made some alterations to the GRUB file....waiting now to see when the damn thing freezes on me again.

 

[Outdated]

But then I'm not very happy with Nvidia either, having spent two to three months attempting to track down why Linux Mint 22 is randomly freezing anywhere from three hours to three day or more. Most suspicions involve Nvidia drivers, but I have yet to find a solution that truly works.

Just a thought, you mentioned before that you have an old GTX650 or something as a spare. What if you swapped cards for a couple of days just to see if you still get the same issue?

 

[Judge]

Just a thought, you mentioned before that you have an old GTX650 or something as a spare. What if you swapped cards for a couple of days just to see if you still get the same issue?

The thing is, this same video card used on the same hardware platform yields different results not based on hardware considerations, but rather software ones. Two somewhat different Ubuntu-based distros using different software drivers. One offers the open-source nouveau driver (Mint) while Pop!OS only offers v.470 or 560 Nvidia drivers.

And my GTX650Ti is so old, it uses only the v.390 driver. Anything higher and it gets ugly. Something I learned with earlier Mint versions 21 and 20. I really don't want to mess with that card on this rather current motherboard.

Unless the problem starts to show up on Pop!OS, it seems pretty clear this is a software issue. Though I still need to run Pop!OS much longer, in as much as I'm still running Mint 22 with this older driver just to see if it works.

Very frustrating to find many alleged solutions on YouTube as well. Contradicting Nvidia's solutions about their own proprietary drivers which didn't work for me. And I didn't really see anyone suggesting I should or needed to update my bios that isn't that old.

Now if I had a spare video card that was a more current one, that might be interesting to compare. But I don't. And I nearly blew it all today corrupting my GRUB file. Took a few hours to get it all back. I was lucky....

Ironically with the oldest driver (v.470) it hasn't generated that Nvidia error in the log still. But I should know within the next few hours or days if this driver fails as well. Your suggestion does intrigue me in simply setting up my old computer to run again, as it has Mint 21.3 installed with the GTX650Ti video card. If that system were to freeze I might just abandon Mint altogether.

 

[Judge]

I think I'm down to only one answer to this random freezing of Mint 22.0. To just keep using my computer until it freezes again. Or not. Which could take as much as six days....much like the last time. Heartbreaking.

If not it will come down to how I modified my GRUB file and perhaps most of all rolled back the video driver to Nvidia 470.256.02. I'm beginning to think whatever is doing this is not something on the log files, but only the System Reports. Trouble is, once the system freezes I cannot see what's on the System Reports. I reboot, which essentially clears whatever was on the System Reports. "Catch-22".

Beyond that I think the only thing left to do is to confirm whether or not Pop!OS22.04 runs without incident on this computer, video card and motherboard.

I'm all out of tricks and hail marys.

 

[Judge]

I'm sure getting an education struggling with troubleshooting Linux Mint. Have finally come to grips with two important dynamics.

1. The System Reports feature. If something truly goes wrong, it will post it. Problem is in my case the system freezes. When that happens, I can't even click on the System Reports to see the error. All I can do is reboot the system. Which effectively erases whatever results the System Reports showed.

2. The log file. Be very careful about fretting over it. Easy in my own case with OCD. Just looking at it compels me to want to do whatever it takes to make them go away. But here's the rub: Doing so may potentially cause new problems. And perhaps most importantly log criticisms do not necessarily cite real problems that must be addressed. More often than not, they are just "programming criticisms" created by pissy developers.

Example: [drm:nv_drm_master_set [nvidia_drm]] *ERROR* [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00000100] Failed to grab modeset ownership

(For as ominous as it appears, some Nvidia sources claim it is innocuous. To ignore it.)

I've spent a great deal of time on this log error, only to surmise that attempting to solve it is not likely connected to why my OS randomly freezes. In the meantime, I've altered the command line of my GRUB file (etc/default/grub) to see if it may stop these freezes:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_rev_override=1 nvidia-drm.modeset=1 loglevel=0"

In the meantime, I've run various tests and used deductive logic to conclude I have no hardware problems that I can find. Only that somewhere in the course of using Mint 21.3 I began to experience random freezes of the entire OS. Which continue with Mint 22.0.

So now it's just a stupid waiting game. One that could last hours or days. Been at this for months now. Making it rather difficult at the moment to seriously recommend Linux to those not up to having to deal with such things. Then again maybe you live a charmed life and will have no such problems with whatever hardware platform you have. Up to now I've resisted updating my bios, but that may be the last card I have to play. We shall see.

Running another Ubuntu-based OS (Pop!OS22.04) on this very platform, to date I've had no such problems. Beats me what's going on with Linux Mint and Nvidia!

So, would I go back to Windows? -Hellno!

 

[Outdated]

Did you try the official driver from nVidia's own website instead of the copy Mint has fiddled with?

 

[Judge]

Did you try the official driver from nVidia's own website instead of the copy Mint has fiddled with?

Not yet, but I still consider it a potentially viable option. I've resisted it up to now only because it continues to confuse me relative to the Mint driver manager. I still have it bookmarked.