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I am completely new to Ubuntu I have an HP laptop compaq 6710b:

Specs: 
2GB ram
Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU T7250 @ 2.00GHz × 2
116GB HDD

There is 2GB swap partition which I presume that the OS setup during the default installation.

I have run an extensive hardware check through BIOS and everything passed.

I wiped and reformatted the HDD some time ago (it had a Windows XP installation before). I then did a clean installation of Ubuntu 16.04. It was running slow from the outset.

Yesterday I upgraded to 18.04

Today I did cold reboot:

These are times in mm:ss from the reboot so NOT actual clock time (it was about 11:20 clock time)

00:00 Power on
00:16 last screen from CMOS … blank purple screen appears
01:54 Ubuntu plus five dots on screen (first three are coloured in)
02:46 Username comes up .. I enter my pw
long period of inactivity with almost no HDD activity follows
05:18 Desktop is loaded and all seems well
05:37 Clicked settings  … long pause
06:44 settings dialogue appears
Repeatedly tried to run the resources utility but nothing happens

There is a journal dump available with lots of red lines, many of them referring to stuff like this:

 [drm:drm_atomic_helper_wait_for_flip_done [drm_kms_helper]] *ERROR* [CRTC:34:pipe A] flip_done timed out

11:20 Load chrome .. everything there working well with brisk page refreshes.
Closed

Opened Libre to write this note ..

Now I left it alone for about 20 minutes then attempted to load Firefox. This sent the HDD into a tailspin with the activity light constantly on. The system was completely unresponsive. After 15 minutes I get a pop-up dialogue offering me a force quit, but even when I clicked on the 'Force Quit' button, the system wouldn't respond, so eventually, I had to do a hard reset.

The same sequence of slow responsiveness repeated.

I have no idea what is causing this. Can anyone help me please?

efthialex
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Phil o'Macc
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2 Answers2

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The drm_kms_helper issue seems to be a known issue:

Here you can find a potential workaround.

Like Kulfy commented, your specs do seem to be on the low side, barely making it onto the minimum requirements:

Ubuntu Desktop Edition

2 GHz dual core processor

2 GiB RAM (system memory)

You may want to go for a hardware upgrade (additional memory), or a software downgrade (switching to a different flavor--Lubuntu is a great alternative).

Aatlantise
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See Ubuntu server 18.04 slow boot due to drm_kms_helper

Your hardware should be fine. I'm also running 18.04 with the same CPU with the same RAM. ( Mine is a 2008 MacBook.) It took 3-4 minutes to boot and forever to start Firefox, System Settings, & etc until I applied the quick & easy workaround linked to above. Now it takes about 30 seconds, and the system runs very responsively overall, as well.

As I noted in the link above, a fix was also incorporated into operating system updates in late January 2019.

Ohiostandard
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