So a week ago I bought it and I've been struggling to make the Ubuntu which I installed stable. There's one thing that makes my life miserable, though. There's this easily reproducible freeze when I start some kind of video. So here is what happens:
Everything works fine for some time
I start vlc/mplayer/flashplayer/totem with something to watch
In few minutes time I lose the sound (nothing in the logs at this point)
At that time the video app instantly allocates all the memory and its CPU usage skyrockets.
Total freeze. I can move the cursor around for few seconds and sometimes even switch to another app. But ultimately there comes the time I can't do anything - can't kill X with ctrl+alt+backspace (I have it enabled), can't switch to any other console (ctrl+alt+f1-6), can't connect to the machine via ssh. The only way to restart it is the ctrl+alt+SysRq+UABI magic :)
What discourages me most is the fact I can't see anything in the logs. The only error I've noticed is Jun 19 17:00:37 serenity kernel: [ 1506.350676] software-center[17581]: segfault at 30 ip 00007fd3631b814c sp 00007fff18a6fa10 error 4 in libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.2400.4[7fd362f7d000+436000]. I've been searching through the Xorg log, kernel logs, syslog. If you have any idea how I can get more debug info I'll be glad to try them.
Things I've tried:
Changing drivers - the open source one, the proprietary driver
xorg-edgers' ppa - https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa
changing to the last stable kernel (2.6.39)
Some notes:
It my be irrelevant but the sound is constantly stuttering. This probably is a separate issue though
I've found that if I start more video/sound apps the freeze happens faster.
