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I have kubuntu 15.10 on my desktop PC with a radeon r390. It happens sometimes that the desktop freezes completely and there is nothing that I can do to fix it but hard reboot. It can happen anytime and I can't find a pattern. I installed fglrx and it works very fine (beside this issue) and I had the same problem with the open source drivers.

I really don't know what to do anymore. I have looked around to find a solution but I can't find anything.

2 Answers 2

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Try forcing the power profile to low, i have the same/similar issue and i think this solved it for me. I got this from this bug report.

In case you can't open the link the suggestion that seems to work for me is:

echo 'low' > '/sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level'

Should this work for you, it might be a good idea to make sure it is set to low on startup.

edit: I followed the instructions to update the firmware and now i think i have everything working even on the auto/balanced profile.

edit2: just froze on auto, will set to low and test for a while to see it low worked or i was just lucky.

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  • thank you for the advice, I think also the issue has to do with power. Maybe I'm out of topic since this is Ask Ubuntu but I got little impatient yesterday and I installed Debian to see how it works. I tried it first with mate, Works good. Then I installed Gnome Shell and again it froze!!! I begin to suspect that the problem arises with more demanding DE as KDE and GNOME. I'll check the bug report and try to set the card to low!
    – Orlando
    Mar 17, 2016 at 8:47
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    The kernel 4.4 did the trick. I installed ubuntu again and updated the kernel and now the Gpu is running fine with the open source drivers!
    – Orlando
    Mar 19, 2016 at 10:54
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    no, It froze again :(
    – Orlando
    Mar 20, 2016 at 19:37
  • It's really anoying, i can't even use it for regular tasks such as browsing or programming. Since some people got it working and your hardware is not the same as mine i was somewhat hopeful it would help you, seems not. Please let me know if you find a solution elsewhere.
    – Zentdayn
    Mar 20, 2016 at 20:47
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    I have some news. Now I'm running debian jessie with kernel 4.3, latest Mesa that I got from the backports, and also a package called firmware-amd-graphics. The Gnome-shell looks great and I used the command the you posted both with "high" and "low" and it seems to work. Yesterday I used Gnome the whole afternoon and it didn't freeze. Gnome made it freeze vary fast precedently. I must try it out a little longer to see if that was the actual problem. In this case is the "auto" setting that is bugged.
    – Orlando
    Mar 22, 2016 at 11:18
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There's a lot of factors that may cause this, My first guess would be not enough ram this can cause your machine to run sluggish and the distribution your using may not be the right one for this machine.

You might want to try a different distribution and see how that runs. Lighter distribution sometimes work better on older machines

I hope this will help get things running correctly

It's helps to post the specs of the machine in question so we can give the best possible answer

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  • you're right I should have been more specific. I don't think that is the problem since the computer is very new and it should be able to handle kubuntu. These are the main spec: Processor : 8x AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor 4 Ghz Memory : 32842MB OpenGL Renderer : AMD Radeon R9 390 Series
    – Orlando
    Mar 13, 2016 at 9:48
  • Have you try another distro to see it that will also freez up on that machine? when I choose a Ubuntu I sometimes have to install a few to see which one works best.
    – Rob Goss
    Mar 13, 2016 at 12:58
  • Yes, that's a good idea. I'm trying Mate now. I mean, I installed Mate DE in Kubuntu. Would it count as a way to test the distribution? I used it yesterday the whole day and it didn't freeze. I will keep using Mate this week to see how it behaves.
    – Orlando
    Mar 14, 2016 at 15:28
  • Yes it's a good practice to try different distributionst of Ubuntu to see which one works best. As Ubuntu develops the distributions they consume more resource
    – Rob Goss
    Mar 14, 2016 at 17:23
  • No, I was wrong. Now I get black screen very often while using kubuntu, not at boot but just suddenly.
    – Orlando
    Mar 20, 2016 at 9:59

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