Oh, my, dreadful experience (help me make Ubuntu Mate NOT crash and freeze)

Support & Help Requests
#1

I tried to be a part of a retroactive future, but only after a couple of hours of use, I survived through panels crashing, system totally freezing when waking from lockscreen and trying to log in, then when i went to tty to try and start x, it just says there’s no session to connect to.
Now, considering I don’t own any fancy and exotic hardware, this is a first for me, as I’ve never encountered anything like this. I have almost all intel components in my computer, and set up the panels to use the classic gnome 2 look instead of the default, and tried using compiz and compton marco options to reduce screen tearing. Overall, a horrendous experience, and if anyone knows what the issues are, please do tell, as I otherwise like Ubuntu Mate and would like to keep it a permanent home.

Thanks

#2

I’ve frankly no idea what is the problem as what you have described is exceptional to the point of being a one off, so far as i am aware.

With that in mind, it makes me think something has gone wrong with the install and your best bet would be to re-download a new copy of the ISO and reinstall.

However, to to be sure you are not using a device that is under-powered for the job, can you please let me know the precise specifications of your device?

#3

You can get your system specs with this.

  cat /proc/cpuinfo
#4

Could be a video driver issue. Have you tried searching for Additional Drivers to see if any others come up for your card? I had similar issues and had to finally install 16.04 with a a proprietary driver from a ppa. They removed the driver I needed from the 18.04 repository and the nouveau driver just created so much instability…not sure why the right driver for my card was removed in18.04 repo while still being available in 16.04 since both 16.04 and 18.04 are still both supported versions. I still have minor issues but the freezes and complete crashes at least stopped happening.

#5

Sure:
Intel x64 motherboard
Intel graphics hd
4gig ddr3
256 gb ssd apacer

On a fujitsu laptop.

Md5 chhecked out before install.

#6

If your laptop is using a baytrail or later Intel “SOC” type CPU that may be your problem.

First thing you should know - this is NOT a Ubuntu Mate specific problem because of an issue with the MATE distro - it’s a really frustrating Intel vs linux-kernel developers horror show related to the way these SOC based Intel CPUs handle power management states.

What happens is that when you do something like play a video, which changes the power management sub-state, the kernel crashes and hard-hangs.

So as suggested, please do a:

cat /proc/cpuinfo
or
lscpu

… and give us the specifics as to what exact CPU you have.

From what you are describing, I’m guessing it’s an Intel baytrail or later SOC type.

I am typing this on a baytrail Laptop using MATE 16.04, and it’s fairly stable now, but had to hack around with it quite a bit just to get it to run stable for more that ten minutes without crashing.

#7 
Architecture:        x86_64

CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 4
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3
Thread(s) per core: 2
Core(s) per socket: 2
Socket(s): 1
NUMA node(s): 1
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
CPU family: 6
Model: 60
Model name: Intel® Core™ i3-4000M CPU @ 2.40GHz
Stepping: 3
CPU MHz: 2394.665
CPU max MHz: 2400,0000
CPU min MHz: 800,0000
BogoMIPS: 4789.32
Virtualization: VT-x
L1d cache: 32K
L1i cache: 32K
L2 cache: 256K
L3 cache: 3072K
NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-3
Flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc cpuid aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 sdbg fma cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 movbe popcnt tsc_deadline_timer xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm abm cpuid_fault epb invpcid_single pti ibrs ibpb stibp tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase tsc_adjust bmi1 avx2 smep bmi2 erms invpcid xsaveopt dtherm arat pln pts

#8

Hmmm, I reset the panel, and everything now seems to be in order. Will post again if issues occur.

#9

Thanks for the CPU info.

I was barking up the wrong tree, because that older haswell CPU of yours should be a tank!

Should be, at least, in a sane world - but be aware that, sadly, thanks to boneheaded stupidity and incompetence on the part of Intel, both M$ and the Linux community are now scrambling to deal with a bunch of Meltdown, and a Spectre induced security nightmares, which have required some really ugly ugly hacks to patch.

So, one thing that could be messing you up is that Intel has prioritized doing the microcode fixes for their Skylake and newer CPU’s first, and have flat of said that the fixes for older chips will have to wait till they finish their fixes for newer chips. and may never work very well.

To be honest, I doubt that they will EVER get all the Spectre security holes completely fixed without things getting really ugly, so someone seriously needs to do a class action lawsuit to force Intel to compensate people - because currently the plan at both Intel and M$ is to treat this as a “business opportunity”, that will make you run right out and reward them for trashing your PC’s performance by buying another computer.

In the mean time, if you have older stuff that still works well, you might want to stay away from the “bleeding edge” kernel and video drivers until things have settled down and stabilized a bit.