EndeavourOS freezing on Toshiba Satellite C650

General system Newbie
#1

Hi folks,

So here’s the story.

A friend of mine has been having a lot of trouble recently with his Windows 7 installation. Slow and frustrating to use. I offered to help, tried a couple of things to improve speed and responsiveness, but no real improvement. The obvious fix is a fresh install, but I decided to tell him about what I use instead: EndeavourOS.

I showed him the live environment on his laptop and then explained how it can be setup to dual-boot, in case he ever encounters an issue, at least he can “fall back” to windows as a last resort to get things done

So anyway, all good. He lends me his laptop to install EOS.

The installation seemed to complete without issue and I was able to login to the fresh EOS install no problem. Grub is working fine giving the options for Windows & EOS etc on startup.

Trouble is, the laptop keeps freezing. I’ve had to boot into the live environment on the DVD to make this post.

It will freeze when I open Firefox and enter a URL. Generally while I’m in the process of typing it.

It has also frozen while I tried installing Brave browser from the terminal, 3 separate times.

All up it has frozen completely within the first 5 mins of login at least 7 times. I can’t connect the dots to see a pattern for what’s causing it. I have scanned logs, but I don’t know enough about what they mean!

At the end of the day, this bloke just wants a computer that will do what he needs (web browsing, some image editing, music, whatever) and will work reliably; doesn’t need a subscription just to use (à la Windows 10); doesn’t saddle you with all the bullshit tracking and whatever else. In short, the open source OS dream

And I would like to provide that, through the power of FOSS! :laughing:

The following thought has crossed my mind at least once during this exercise:

“Maybe I should just install Ubuntu for him… It could mean less ongoing frustration for both of us”

But of course, there’s no guarantee that would be the case…

And I really like EOS!

So I’m reaching out to you, where can I start to fix this issue? How can I find the cause?

I also tried to change the grub timeout from 5 to 30 seconds by changing the

GRUB_TIMEOUT=

parameter from “5” to “30” in the /etc/default/grub file but that hasn’t worked… It still counts down from 5 seconds :thinking:

So that’s another issue. Does anyone have any insight on what might have gone wrong there?

Cheers,

Focus

#2

Hello @focus
It would be helpful if you could upload a link to the hardware using the log tools provided on the welcome screen. We would be looking for this one from the log tool. inxi -Fxxc0z

Edit:
You can do this from the live ISO if you have issues with the installed system.

#3

Hello @ricklinux! Thanks for responding

I couldn’t find what you referred to specifically…

Hardware
Hardware1280×720 128 KB

But, I think this will do the job… Yeah?

#################### hwinfo --short ########################

cpu:
Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU T4500 @ 2.30GHz, 2294 MHz
Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU T4500 @ 2.30GHz, 2294 MHz
keyboard:
/dev/input/event3 AT Translated Set 2 keyboard
mouse:
/dev/input/mice SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad
monitor:
N156B6-L06 LCD Monitor
graphics card:
Intel Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller
Intel Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller
sound:
Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller
storage:
Intel 82801IBM/IEM (ICH9M/ICH9M-E) 4 port SATA Controller [AHCI mode]
network:
wlan0 Qualcomm Atheros AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express)
enp2s0 Qualcomm Atheros AR8152 v1.1 Fast Ethernet
network interface:
wlan0 WLAN network interface
enp2s0 Ethernet network interface
lo Loopback network interface
disk:
/dev/sdb Generic Multi-Card
/dev/sda ST9320325AS
Realtek RTS5138 Card Reader Controller
partition:
/dev/sda1 Partition
/dev/sda2 Partition
/dev/sda3 Partition
/dev/sda4 Partition
cdrom:
/dev/sr0 MATSHITA DVD-RAM UJ890AS
usb controller:
Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6
Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5
Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2
Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3
Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4
Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1
Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2
Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1
bios:
BIOS
bridge:
Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1
Intel ICH9M LPC Interface Controller
Intel 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge
Intel Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub
Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2
Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 5
hub:
Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
memory:
Main Memory
unknown:
FPU
DMA controller
PIC
Keyboard controller
Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller
/dev/input/event10 Importek Laptop Integrated Webcam

#4

Are you able to use the terminal without it freezing? Not sure if uninstalling xf86-video-intel will help and reboot. Then hopefully it will run on the modesetting kernel driver for graphics.

#5

I’ll try it! Haven’t had great success with the terminal so far. The few times I tried to install brave browser using yay has seen it freeze, requiring a hard reset. I’ll give it a go though. Unless there’s a way to uninstall xf86-video-intel from the live ISO?

My gut tells me no… :upside_down_face:

#6

If you can boot the system and then go into a TTY screen and log in as root you can and then reboot.

#7

So that’s ctrl+alt+f2 at the login screen, yeah?

1 Like
#8

You have to update GRUB’s configuration after changing its settings (using grub-mkconfig or similar).

#9

With Arch based/EOS systems you can always chroot into a system to add/remove/fix things if needed from a live iso. Once you have chrooted in, you can just uninstall or work normally pretty much.

If I were you, unless you want to be helping on some semblance of regular basis, I would suggest going something even more idiot proof. Generally people who don’t really care. . . don’t really care. Solus, MX and Linux Mint are great options. EOS may be tough for them, maybe not. A lot of people get nervous about the terminal.

#10

Thanks @jonathon I’ll give that a go

#11

With Arch based/EOS systems you can always chroot into a system to add/remove/fix things if needed

I didn’t know that! Thank you, great information

If I were you, unless you want to be helping on some semblance of regular basis, I would suggest…

You’re probably right… In this case it’s not that my friend doesn’t care. It’s more that the learning curve is actually a huge vertical cliff. Born in a time when computing wasn’t ubiquitous like it is now

#12

Update:

I was able to uninstall xf86-video-intel from a TTY thanks to @ricklinux’s advice

This hasn’t solved the problem though… I tried updating the system with yay (18 upstream updates) but it froze again. It got much further along in the process than previous attempts however, which got me thinking all was right…

Oh well.

It was at this point in the update process when it froze… might be helpful?

==> Creating xz-compressed initcpio image: /boot/initramfs-linux.img

Thanks for all the help everyone

#13

I had the same problem, everything installs fine but after the update I had randome freezing, the problem was kernel 5.12, with lts kernel everything works fine

#14

That is probably your best bet. May be debian would be even better. Your friend does not seem to have enough affinity to IT to keep up with a rolling release like Arch. He was still using Windows 7, which is end of life since January 2020. He does not seem to be the regular-update-guy :wink:

But before you do that I would check the hardware resp. memory. This laptop is probably 10+ years old. I would recommend to let memtest86 check the memory of that laptop before anything else.

EDIT:
You could also try acpi=off kernel parameter

1 Like
#15

You could also try the following kernel parameter since the laptop is a Windows 7 era.

acpi_osi="Windows 2009"

Edit: Could be the hard drive needs replacing also since you mentioned it being slow on Windows prior.

#16

As seen in your hwinfo the PC is old. Even my newer Ryzen 5 sometimes needs more than 30 seconds to build the initramfs-linux.img or other parts of the kernel.
Try to make the update with yay, wait for up to 10 min. and check, if the hard drive is working during that time. If the update still does not work, you may have a different problem.

1 Like
#17

Just a tiny update for this one. It’s old, I know. I don’t want to piss anyone off if that goes against forum etiquette here. I apologise, if that’s the case. Just wanting to share closure, I suppose…

In the end I decided to install the latest Debian release on his machine and I haven’t heard from him about it since. I’m taking that to mean all is well. No news is good news and all that…

Thanks @ricklinux for all your help here

@jonathon: thank you for the education on how to change the grub timeout settings

@fbodymechanic: thanks for the information on chroot

@marteng69: thankyou for your assistance

@mbod: thanks for the suggestion. As you can see that’s the direction I went with this one

I think that’s everyone. Thank you sincerely for your time. Your kindness and patience is appreciated

Focus

3 Likes
#18

Nothing wrong with Debian. Version 11 is coming out this month. I have another distro using the pre release of Debian 11. It’s very stable and updates less frequently. Glad it’s working for you. Everyone has to do what is right for themselves. The fact that they are using Linux over Windows is a benefit.

2 Likes
#19

The fact that they are using Linux over Windows is a benefit

So true!