Hi John and all,
SuSE 9.3_64 shows on a AMD64 3200 machine with MSI K8T Neo FIS2R board with 512 MB RAM and GeForce5900XT (nvidia 7664 driver) after upgrading RAM with another 512 MB a weird behavior. After a differently while (between 5 and 20 minutes), keyboard completely and mouse bottons are freeze. Mouse pointer is working, also the rest of the system. Tested with ssh or a X connection from a remote computer. Also memtest is running without a error message. Because other OS (Win2k Pro, Solaris 10), installed besides on the same AMD64 machine, are working solid like a rock with the additional RAM, I think, this is not a hardware problem. It seems, that SuSE 9.3_64 makes the trouble. What can I do? Run memtest86 on it. as I wrote, memtest (memtest86 v3.2) gives 0 Err as result. Tested today again with a run over 5 hours. No Error at all. You may need to rachet back the speed of the memory to get stability. Setting in Bios the CAS latency to 3.0 makes no difference. Win2k Pro and Solaris 10 are running very well, SuSE 9.3_64 on the same machine make trouble. But if a remote computer is connected to that SuSE box, I can work on this SuSE 9.3_64 over ssh or a X session from the remote machine for hours and hours. What is wrong? Your problem sure sounds like it is the NVidia driver - there is a well-known and long-standing problem with the exact symptoms you describe - frozen X but working mouse, can still login remotely. Unfortunately, I've never seen a definitive fix - different things work for different hardware. The only sure fix is to stop using the NVidia binary driver entirely, and use "nv" instead, but no 3D then :(.
yes, with "nv" instead of "nvidia", the freezes has gone. But as you wrote, also 3D acceleration. And in the meantime another weird thing has shown: With the additional 512 MB RAM VMware has read errors on CD/DVDs and CD/DVD images. Its a mess. And I give up. :( After removing the additional 512 MB, the "nvidia" driver works again, and so the read errors under vmware are gone. The question stays, why Win2k Pro and Solaris 10 can handle the two 512 MB module, but Linux cant... BTW, thanks for all antwort replying and hints, Kindly regards Uwe -- (Open)PGP Key auf Anfrage, (Open)PGP-Key on request