[ale] Weird ubuntu tricks...

[William wylde]

I'm running 64-bit ubuntu on a machine I built from scratch.  It has a 
1gb RAM, One 300gb SATA drive, and one 300gb IDE drive.  The display is 
running on a Nvidia G-Force 7 chipset, EPCI interface, with 512mb VRAM 
onboard (there is no fan on the board- I throw this in because I think 
it may prove relevant). 

This system runs fine until I try to use the opengl subsystem- and it's 
configured properly.  The proprietary Nvidia drivers are installed via 
envy & apparently configuered correctly.  And 3d apps will work for a 
few minutes before crashing.

Unreal 1 will run seemingly forever- but I wasn't able to maintain 
attention to the game for more than the first few maps of the opening 
level, so it might eventually cause the system to crash, as well.

When the system crashes, the monitor loses the signal from the card, and 
it seems the entire system will freeze, since I have to turn the system 
completely off both with the power-on switch and the input switch on the 
back of the power-supply, then turn it all back on before I can start 
the sytem again.  A hard reset- though it works when the system is 
stable- will not reboot the system when the crash occurs.

I was wondering whether this was simply a case of the GPU on my card 
getting hot and shutting down (i.e. I need to get a cooling unit for the 
card), or if there might be a software issue somewhere under it all that 
I'm overlooking. 

If it's a software problem, I'll need to get it fixed whether I get a 
GPU cooler or not...   And I figure this is the place to get opinions on 
the matter...  :)

Which I guess I'm going to do.  It'll make me feel better about it 
all... heh.