I was about to praise Ubuntu ...

I still might be in a position to heap praise upon Ubuntu 8.04 for its performance on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) since I reinstalled it a couple of weeks ago with a separate /home partition and a not-screwed-up UUID scenario.

But I keep getting these freezes in which ctrl-alt-backspace or ctrl-alt-delete won't save me. I have to do a hard reset with the power button.

Now this could be due to the shaky nature of my power connection (the power jack from the laptop's brick doesn't quite meet up with the hacked power plug I installed to make this laptop work after I first acquired it). Having a dead battery doesn't help.

I need to figure out whether my freezes in Ubuntu are due to the OS itself or due to the flaky power situation.

I finally got a replacement power jack at Fry's that I could use on the power brick to make a foolproof connection.

It could be chance, but this freezing problem never happens in Debian Lenny, which has problems of its own (related to X refresh, and chronicled in agonizing detail on this very blog).

I will confirm that suspend/resume continues to work, as does everything else. Except for this cursor-freezing.

Again, I'm not ready to blame Ubuntu and am more inclined to blame the power jack/plug situation. I am keeping an eye on the problem.

Another 150 or so updates rolled into Debian Lenny recently, including new Xorg and Intel video driver packages. For the upteenth time, I'm hoping for the miracle of properly refreshing X. It didn't do so well yesterday just after the updates, but there were some "enhancements" to the Debian login screen, principally the word "Debian" appearing in the upper left portion of the screen.

Again, my hope is that this X problem somehow solves itself and I can continue using Debian on this laptop. Again, no breath being held.