robhants
October 13, 2024, 8:34pm
1
Hi,
I’ve just upgraded from 39 to 40 using the GUI, and now my old laptop locks up completely when starting gnome applications like Files or Calculator. It completely freezes and all I can do is a hard reset. Non Gnome applications like Chrome and Nedit seem fine.
It seems to happen as soon as the application gets mouse focus. Any suggestions as to what is causing this and how to fix it? I’m scared to open a new application because it’s liable to freeze
I’ve tried switching from Wayland to X, and also creating a new user. The Lenovo W510 is about 14 years old, but it has 8GB of RAM and worked flawlessly with Fedora 39.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Br,
Robin.
How new is the bios.?
You are aware, I hope, that with the rapid development speed of fedora, and the kernel especially, hardware that is 14 years old (28 fedora releases) will eventually no longer be fully supported. This may be caused by many factors, but it will take digging in to the details to identify it.
Please show us the output of inxi -Fzxx so we may see the actual hardware and drivers in use.
robhants
October 13, 2024, 10:02pm
3
Thanks for replying. The BIOS is from 2012 and is the latest version available! I had to update that to install Fedora 39 from a USB stick last year.
Yes, of course I know it won’t be supported forever, but if you are able to spot something from the output below that would be great:
System:X.org v: 1.20.14 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.3
System:X.org v: 1.20.14 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.3
I do not see anything specific in that listing (It seems you pasted the output twice).
The only real thing I note from the text is that your battery is really low. Cannot tell if that is simply the way you have it without charging, or if that is a result of the battery age and reduced capacity. If I am reading that correctly the original capacity was 93.2 Wh and the present capacity is only 24% of that at 22.7 Wh while the current charge is only 80% of that current capacity or 18.3 Wh.
A battery that is low on capacity can cause strange effects sometimes, including lockups or shutdowns – especially during heavy loads such as start up, launching an app, or similar.
you said the 2012 bios is the latest and it is known that often older bios are not compatible with newer kernels.
Sorry I cannot be of more assistance, but it may be that the hardware is simply not compatible with the newer OS.
robhants
October 14, 2024, 1:39am
5
Thanks for looking, but I seem to have found a solution now. Creating a .sh file in /etc/profile.d containing the following:
export GSK_RENDERER=gl
stops the gnome applications from locking up. I found this in other forums as a solution for general Gnome 46 problems with older hardware and virtual machines.
So it seems to be a GTK4 related problem with older hardware. The following blog post also says “If you are using GTK on very old hardware, you may be better off with the old GL renderer, since it makes fewer demands on the GPU”:
https://blog.gtk.org/2024/01/28/new-renderers-for-gtk/
The battery in my laptop is very old, but the same thing happened with AC power and the lockups were not random - they happened consistently with the same GTK applications. So problem solved luckily. I hope this might be of use to somebody else still using older hardware.
1 Like
Luckily the terminal still works so I can run shell commands.