[SOLVED] Random Desktop Freezes

[jonnjonzzn]

I am experiencing inconsistent, unreproducible, seemingly random lockups/hard freezes of my system. There honestly seems to be no consistent tie-in to running applications, length of time running, etc.

I am running F14 32 bit (PAE) up to date, Gnome Desktop with compiz enabled.

Hardware:

Acer Aspire 5740-5513
i3 330M
4GD DDR3
Intel (integrated) HD Graphics
Atheros AR928X wireless

I can provide more hardware details if helpful.

Commonly used applications are firefox, chrome, virtualbox, terminal, evolution, nautilus, pidgin

Before I spend hours troubleshooting I thought I'd see if anyone else is seeing this behavior? I have run both the latest two versions of Ubuntu without this issue on this same laptop. I really want to stay on Fedora after a few years away but this is my lone work machine and have to have stability. Before I reluctantly head back to Ubuntu I thought I'd see if there any suggestions/similar stories out there.

I've seen seen many similar type threads, some pertaining to nvidia, firefox, virtualbox, but I wonder if there might be a greater underlying evil.

Thanks for the otherwise wonderful release, Fedora developers. I really enjoy F14 and hope I can solve this issue.

-Mike

[CSchwangler]

I don't experience the behaviour you describe. Since it seems to be very random, heat or faulty memory could be a reason. Did you already rule these out?

[jonnjonzzn]

The problem ended up being the Atheros chipset and ath9k wireless kernel module. Once I downloaded and compiled a newer version of the wireless drivers from:
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download/stable/
all ran well and the freezes stopped.

I can't confirm for certain but I believe a kernel upgrade also corrected this problem and simply just allowing the latest kernel to install will fix the situation without the need to compile the drivers yourself.

If you would like more details on this issue please feel free to PM me.