Comment 164 for bug 204996

I just had a thought: a number of people have suggested that this may be disk I/O related, and some people have apparently been running the live CD without problems. Has anyone tried doing a persistent install on a USB stick, e.g. as on http://t-skariah.blogspot.com/2008/04/ubuntu-804-hardy-heron-on-usb.html ? It might help to verify whether the bug was IDE/SATA related.

Also, would it possible for someone (preferrably officially, but unofficially is better than not at all) to package up an earlier version of the kernel? I know there's been some discussion on this thread as to what the best thing to do is, and I agree that just giving up on the problem and going back to an earlier kernel isn't a viable longterm solution. However, given how difficult to track down this problem is proving and how frustrating it is for those experiencing it, a properly set up package of an earlier kernel (e.g. 2.6.18) as an interim measure would be very helpful. As it is, the computer I'm experiencing the bug on is essentially unusable. This is a real shame, I just installed Hardy on another computer and it runs beautifully, I am very impressed by how well everything's working when this bug doesn't appear. I would offer to build a package this myself, but while I can just about compile and install a custom kernel, I have almost no experience of building packages, nor do I know how to set up a standard "generic" kernel. I suppose it's even possible that such kernel would still experience the same bug, but that in itself would tell us something useful.