Hello!
I have a notebook Asus K 50 IP, bought in 2010. GPU nVIDIA GeForce G102M. Salix 14.1 XFCE. About a month ago the system started to freeze while I was using Firefox with about 20 tabs. It hangs and does not respond keystrokes and mouse.Trying to wait for about 10 minutes does not help and I have to press the power button. When using PCLinux OS on the same mashine I haven't countered this problem yet. It happens quite rarely, about 2-3 times a week. Besides, my mother has this problem with the same OS on her Compaq the same age as my laptop, GPU nVIDIA GeForce G103M, though I was not able to see her logs. I looked at the /var/log/messages and found such a messages: nouveau [ PTHERM][0000:02:00.0] temperature (90 C) hit the 'fanboost' threshold.
Frankly, I don't want to install proprietary drivers, as my card is old enough and support will be finished sooner or later. I had some meningits with it on PCLOS. I googlesearched and found some posts, offering to change some settings in /etc/sysfs.conf, but I did not find this file in my system, though sysfsutils-2.1.0-i486-1 is installed. I found an nv driver installed. Maybe use this. But how to configure it if there is neither /etc/X11/xorg.conf nor device.conf in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d? What should I do?
27.02 Yesterday I encountered this problem on PCLOS, /var/log/messages showed, that fanspeed 100%. I also looked at my mother's logs, but found nothing neither in /var/log, nor in Xorg.log,nor in dmesg. I was a little confused firstly if nouveau supports power management or not, but now I found out that it doesn't, at least for my card. So I had to install proprietary driver and the problem was solved either on my notebook or on mother's one, thou an item "VGA" disappeared from the output of sensors.