Ubuntu 10.10 freezes when using wireless on battery

[tiredofguessingusernames]

Hi All

Unlike a lot of others, I have had no problems getting the wireless on my Dell Studio 1558 working with the STA driver. As long, as I am not on battery, that is. Within minutes of switching to battery and disconnecting from the LAN, my system freezes: I cannot move the mouse, the keyboard is useless (I can't even Ctrl-Alt to a terminal) and my only option is a hard boot.

I currently have the 2.6.35-23 kernel and I have tried the following driver options for the wireless (all the below were tried with 2.6.35-22):

- the Broadcom STA driver in the repos
- the latest STA dirver from Broadcom
- the new broadcom driver, not yet available in ubuntu repos (brcm80211)
- ndiswrapper ( I can only get win 7 drivers for my laptop, so this does not even enable the driver)

My Wifi card uses the BCM43224 chipset.

After a freeze, I have pored over the logs and I cannot find any obvious error messages preceding the event - so I am a little at wit's end ito resolving this. Can anybody give me any clues as to where I should start looking to resolve this issue?

[grahammechanical]

Are you switching to battery without shutting down? What do you mean by "disconnecting from the LAN?" Are you physically changing the configuration of the system without warning the OS first?

Things freeze, as you put it, when the OS gets locked into repeat operations that use up all the processing power and/or memory. The OS is trying to accomplish a more important task than re-drawing the screen to reflect mouse movements or key presses.

Regards.

[tiredofguessingusernames]

So - the steps are more or less like this:

1) I am at my desk, I have both a wifi connection the network as well as a Wifi connection.
2) I unplug the AC power lead (so the laptop is now running off battery) and I disconnect the Ethernet cable so that I only have the Wifi connection. In other words, I am using the laptop pretty much the way it was intended.
3) Within a few minutes, the laptop freezes and does not accept input from keyboard or mouse.

Given that I have a Core i5, and that this happens repeatedly regardless of how many windows I have open or what tasks I perform, I would really like to know what the OS thinks is so important - so that I can correct it!

I am not sure exactly how I am supposed to warn the OS that I am going to move the laptop (it freezes whether I physically move the laptop or not) - but I have two other laptops both running Ubuntu, that handle the same behaviour just fine.

[jagadish7]

I have a similar issue with my Ubuntu 10.10 running on MacBook. I have no issues what so ever running 10.04 with the older version of the kernel(now i have 2.6.35-23).

Issue details:
The system freezes and goes to a blank screen when i remove the power and the laptop turns to Battery power. All i can do is do a force restart. I could find no information about the crash in the log files and have no clue on how to fix the issue.


Jax

[cdillard-hsp]

Same problem here. It's random though and not easily duplicated (i.e. doesn't happen every time I go from power plugged in to unplugged and running on battery). I have an HP Elitebook 8530w with an Intel wireless card, Ubuntu 10.10 x86_64 with the 2.6.35-23 kernel and this notebook has an Nvidia Quadro FX card.

This morning I repeatedly unplugged and plugged in the power supply with no freeze. I do see that EXT-4 is re-mounted ro in /var/log/messages every time power is swapped and though this might be normal, it could be a clue.

[tiredofguessingusernames]

Hi

I found this post that contained the solution to my problem:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...5&postcount=12

Since rolling back to an older version of pmi-utils, I have had no problems with battery power at all!

I have marked the thread as solved - jagadish, cdillard - hope the above link helps you guys out as well!

[AgentZ86]

I also suspect something in the power management.

Let me as when you turn on the computer on battery power first then plugin the power does this create the same symptom ?

And then unplugging it again after being first booted to battery power only.

Does this create the same symptom again ?

Perhaps turn off power management features first in ubuntu and see if this has any effect.

And try turning off power management features in the bios to see if this has any effect.

See if doing any of this can pinpoint which power management setting may be the problem.

I don't know if any of this will help, but worth a try.

[david111]

i have a problem as well. only when i unplug my cord the screen freezes and the caps lock light on the keyboard blinks. i have a toshiba satalite l505d-s5983

[cdillard-hsp]

I went through the process of downgrading pm-utils as one poster suggested but this had no effect. I still suffer from the freeze. I've just added acpi=off in the kernel options but this is not a good long-term solution and I've not played with the power yet to see if it will still freeze up on me.

Sure do wish Ubuntu folks would fix this.

I've submitted a bug on this so please do go and add your comments so that this gets some attention.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/684164

Thanks,
Clay

[david111]

thanks for your help. ubuntu needs to fix this, i know its ubuntu because i installed fedora 14 and tested the unplug and stand by and it worked flawlessly but i couldnt get the wifi working so i switched back to ubuntu