Crashing with diagonally oriented colored bars

Support & Help Requests
1

Intermittent crashing displaying diagonally oriented jagged colored lines or bars requiring reboot. Has occurred occaisionally while doing the following:

  1. Loading Chrome or Firefox
  2. Clicking on the close or minimize button on a panel
  3. Pressing unlock on a password keyring popup.
  4. Booting into UM

I’m assuming possibly a graphics problem, maybe ram??? I’m using the beta version of UM 18.01 and I realize this might be the problem as well. Will be reinstalling when the final version comes out later this month. Will also try cleaning the contacts and re-seating the cards and ram, that use to work back in the day. Don’t want to give up on this OS…just to good!

Some System Specs:
AMD Phenom X4 9150e Quad-Core
4GB ram
NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE Graphics

Any insight in to what may be causing these crashes is much appreciated.
Thanks.

2

From what you’re describing it sounds like either a hardware or driver problem.
The last is easy to check: just load up a kernel version you know used to work, and see if it still does (for instance, if you remember no issue using 16.04, use that).
If it’s a hardware issue, then it will still affect every possible kernel, including when you’re using a USB live session.

To test the RAM, there is an utility in the GRUB menu called “memtest”

3

Thanks for those suggestions. Tests that I have done so far:

  1. I ran a live session of 18.04 beta 2 for a few hours last night, the version I originally used to install UM and the system ran smoothly. A little snappier as well probably due to it being a live session and running on ram disk…I presume.

  2. Ran a memtest… no problems to report there.

  3. Went back to the full install 18.04 beta version this morning…had 2 crashes of the same type, diagonal coloured lines.

i) First crash event while working on this message and switching back and forth between Mate Tweak and this text box.

ii) Second crash event right after rebooting and clicking on the welcome screen minimize button.

I’m hoping the final release of 18.04 in a few weeks and a fresh install will fix this issue otherwise a new video card possibly?

Some how it feels like a video issue…but then again I may be shooting in the dark…any further suggestions welcome.