Re: Debian Wheezy freezing
Am Samstag, 2. Februar 2013 schrieb William Ivanski:
> Hi everybody,
Hi William,
> I have a Lenovo laptop, with CPU Intel Core i5, which I use to work.
> I installed Debian Wheezy and the system freezes randomly. No response
> to keyboard or mouse clicks, just mouse moves. Needed to restart all the
> times.
What is this laptop exactly?
I have a ThinkPad T520 with Intel Core i5 Sandybridge and do not remember
such a problem while I ran a 3.2 kernel (quite some time ago).
But if this is an Ivybridge system, I can image that a newer kernel is
needed.
Yes, may be that Debian Wheezy when released will not provide a fully
working out of the box experience on Ivybridge systems. I hope it does, but
some stuff is really rather outdated already.
> I searched a lot about this problem, and many people suggest the
> installation of a newer kernel (current is 3.2).
> Currently, on kernel.org, stable release is 3.7.5.
>
> I never compiled a kernel before, so I am afraid of the problems it
> might create. I'm worried about virtualbox, which I installed through
> aptitude.
> I'm also considering upgrade to Debian unstable branch. It have a kernel
> newer than 3.2, doesn't it?
>
> So my questions are:
>
> 1) Which is better? Keep Debian Wheezy and compile a new kernel, or
> upgrade to Debian Sid?
As hinted by others: Wheezy contains a 3.2 kernel as well:
martin@merkaba:~> rmadison linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64
linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64 | 3.2.35-2 | wheezy | amd64, i386
linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64 | 3.2.35-2 | sid | amd64, i386
> 2) Have you guys compiled a kernel before? How it was? Can you provide
> me a good tutorial about it?
I´d still suggest first trying with a newer kernel from Debian Experimental,
like this one for 64-Bit:
martin@merkaba:~> rmadison linux-headers-3.7-trunk-amd64
linux-headers-3.7-trunk-amd64 | 3.7.3-1~experimental.1 | experimental |
amd64, i386
So you can easily see whether it fixes your issue without taking the effort to
compile your own kernel.
Beware tough that you may need newest virtualbox-source packages in order to
compile VirtualBox for 3.7. It might not even work then. There have been
problems. Check
Compatibility with 3.7-trunk kernel
http://bugs.debian.org/698607
According to this bug report compilation has been fixed with:
virtualbox (4.1.18-dfsg-2.1) experimental; urgency=low
I cannot tell for sure whether the fix works, cause I am on 3.8-rc6 already.
I think the kernel package as well as the virtualbox package will be
installable just fine under Wheezy. You need to add the experimental branch
of the Debian repository tough. Standard priority of it is that low that
there is no risk of accidentally upgrading Wheezy packages to it. That would
look like this:
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ experimental main non-free contrib
(adapt to your Debian mirror)
But as for the trunk kernel packages: They move quickly. Thus in time for
newer kernel they may diverge too much from Wheezy to installable without a
backport. Thus if going that route, I´d suggest looking for an official
backport kernel every now and then after Wheezy has been released. I think
it will be crucial to provide one, cause otherwise Wheezy will not run on
well Intel Haswell hardware which is being released this year. That said, I
see no reason why a once installed trunk kernel won´t continue to run for
the lifetime of Wheezy. (It will not receive security support, once the
Debian kernel team moved to the next kernel, thus I´d still prefer a
backport kernel unless I move along with testing or sid:)
Debian Stable is a bit tooo stable for current hardware development speeds
even tough Intel developers develop upto three generations of hardware in
order that support for it may reach distributions early enough. Most Haswell
patches were ready end of last year and some patches for Broadwell, the
successor for Haswell have already landed.
Ciao,
--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
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