T60 Gutsy: jerky cursor, slowdown, ipw3945 Microcode SW erro

[John H]

My Trusty Gutsy Thinkpad T60 suddenly has jumpy/jerky cursor syndrome and has slowed down to a crawl. And I've restarted it many times. I think it's the flash-nonfree I installed last week (I've often had trouble with flash and usually don't run it). But now the T60 is unusable.

Anyone else have this problem?

When I move the stick the cursor moves an inch and pauses for a couple seconds before it'll move again.

The computer has slowed down to a crawl.

Oh yeah, the wireless stopped working, too.

Is there a way to backoff the Synaptic updates until I get back to a working system?

Should I try replacing Gutsy with a Heron? Alpha-4? Alpha-6?

When I try to use the HDD dual-boot to get to "ubuntu (recovery mode)" from the bootlist I get endless repitition of these error msgs:

nnn.nnnnnn ipw3945:Microcode SW error detected. Restarting.
nnn.nnnnnn ipw3945:Error reply type 0x0000005 cmd ADD_STA (0x1 seq 0x0407 ser 0x004A0000
nnn.nnnnnn ipw3945: Can't stop Rx DMA.

the 'nnn.nnnnn' is a bunch if increasing numbers.

Also,I can't boot from a CD.

[lightweight]

I have seen that error with old ipw firmware/drivers. Two options: upgrade to iwlwifi (surely there are instructions for Ubuntu, and this has replaced ipw3945 anyway) or use a 2.6.24 kernel (which may be in Ubuntu backports for your release; otherwise, I believe I read here that Ubuntu's alpha uses 2.6.24 if you don't want to just install it from Debian debs or compile).

Probably want another thread on your boot from CD problem.

[tarvoke]

I got the very same SW / DMA error recently multiple times, the only thing I can think of is that I was at a friend's house who uses wpa(/2?) rather than the wep ap I normally use where I live.

have been using hardy kernel w/ gutsy system (and now purely hardy beta system) for weeks now, so I would have to place the blame on the iwl3945 module. surprising that this issue also shows up in ipw3945 -- I had other issues in ipw but not this...

[whizkid]

I've had great luck running Fedora on my T60, so it's probably a configuration issue on your machine.

What diagnostic tools have you tried?

[tarvoke]

also, many things can be blamed on flash*, ugh.

you could try:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree

and see if that makes any improvement.

not sure I can recommend upgrading to 8.04 at this point (it's ... interesting) but you could try using the 2.6.24 kernel in gutsy, I have had great success doing that for the last few months:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=646755

*I hate flash so much...

[John H]

My new miniPCI Express 3945 arrived today so I turned on the T60 (after 2 weeks of not using it) and it came up just fine (well, the CD didn't work...).

Anyway, I'm using it right now and I haven't replaced the 3945 yet. So I probably won't until/if the problem recurs.

This is very confusing.

I'll try the XP partition later today.

I wonder if Hardy will fix this? I have a beta CD sitting here.