SL sometimes brings down my whole PC

What it says above really. Recently it's happened four or five times now - while playing SL my whole system has frozen solid. You can't do anything at all. The screen locks, you can't ssh in and it's just utterly *******. The only way out is powering off. This is rather alarming on Linux and I've not seen it in seven years of using the OS.

No other program does it - it's definitely SL that's causing it.

I'm running Mandriva 2008.0. Has anyone else seen this? Can anyone think of a way of tracking down what it might be?

Many thanks.

Bosco, what is your hardware configuration, what drivers do you use. Without these information it is impossible to figure out what is causing this. Oh and the SL viewer version

On another note, has anyone tried resizing the KDE taskbar while SL is running and maximized? I highly recommend it, and hopefully I'm not the only one who experiences total SL lockup.

I've just experienced the same problem with latest SL client in Ubuntu 7.10. I have a System 76 Pangolin laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo cpu with 2Gb RAM and Intel X3100 video).

The whole system crashes when I login to SL and the only way out is shutting down the computer.

Any suggestions?

This is a problem with the video driver. Since Xwindows and the video driver run as root when they crash it can bring your machine down.
Be sure your video driver is up to date. List your hardware specs, current driver, version of SL. Also when running SL try disabling all the openGL extensions through the secondlife script. See if those changes make a difference.

I'm having the same problem with Mint 3.1 (based on Ubuntu 7.04).

Here's the system information:

Second Life 1.18.5 (75173) Dec 5 2007 17:48:03 (Second Life WindLight)

You are at 253818.0, 306737.9, 21.7 in Money Island located at sim4358.agni.lindenlab.com (63.210.158.8:13005)
Second Life Server 1.18.6.75511

CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+
Memory: 2027 MB
OS Version: Linux 2.6.20-15-generic #2 SMP Sun Apr 15 07:36:31 UTC 2007 i686
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce FX 5500/AGP/SSE2/3DNOW!
OpenGL Version: 2.1.1 NVIDIA 100.14.19
LLMozLib Version: 1.1.0 (Mozilla GRE:1.8.0.12_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 87/336388 (0.0%)
Viewer Digest: 98e055cd-590a-d6bb-8441-00dd9e93ca03

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Vince

Problem Solved.

I replaced the 450W power supply with a 600W PSU & upgraded the graphics card from a GeForce FX 5500 to a GeForce 7600 GS. The system has been stable for 3 days . What I think is that the old PSU was just barely able to supply power to the system.

So the moral of the story is if you are having lockups and crashes, check your PSU.

Vince

It's amazing and true. People upgrade the machines, leave an old 300 - 350 watt ps in the box and end up having issues. I have seen alot of this. Most machines with the latest or even close to the latest video really do need the juice. I've been putting 620W Corsair PS in the boxes because of this. The stability of course is improved when your not starving a component for the power needed.

I've had good luck with this particular standard ATX model.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139002

In Linux, I've found better experiences in using the "non-free" supported driver that is provided by default with Nvidia than downloading or compiling the latest drivers from the Nvidia site. Of course this is over time and with various tries. Seems the stability is superior anyhow.

--Tracy

Was going to say. Full lock ups in Linux are very rare. I've had them from a faulty CPU and a graphics card with a dead fan that took to overheating, but never from software. The CPU bug took ages to track down!!!
Ok so the buggy software might die, but the OS will keep trundling along 99.9% of the time.

I need to mention that in 9 years of running Linux, I've yet to see a lockup that wasn't caused by faulty hardware, though one can't rule out the possibility of a buggy video driver. It may be tempting to blame SL for a lockup, but SL is not the CAUSE of the lockup, rather it is the TRIGGER of the true cause, which is hardware failure. Nothing works your video hardware over like SL!

SL did make my system freeze quite a few times.. but nothing as bad as described above.. CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE was always able to solve this kind of problems.