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Wayne Werner
Asked: 2018-08-16 13:55:58 +0800 CST

Why does my Ubuntu 18.04 randomly shut down?

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I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 (start with server edition, because the hardware is pretty weak) on some older hardware - a desktop. Memtest ran fine on it before I installed, but it seems that it will randomly shut down - typically when I'm doing something like a sudo apt-get update. It appears to go through the normal shutdown process - I see all the shutdown messages, etc. But it's definitely a forcible sort of stop since I have to run dpkg --configure -a or whatever it is if I was in the middle of installing software.

Any clue what could be happening here? I have a theory it might be related to power consumption but I'm not sure why that would cause what I'm seeing. If I run glxgears I can run like 10 of them at a time (slows my FPS way down, of course) for a couple of minutes and then beeeooooop! Off my machine goes.

Is there somewhere I could look?

shutdown 18.04

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    In my case, it turned out to be an Nvidia driver that caused random shutdowns. I had the driver 396.54, but removing it and installing the 390.87 fixed the problem. You can do something like

    sudo apt purge 'nvidia*'
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt install nvidia-390
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  2. For me it was also the temperature limit, although I think it is a false postive and something makes that value jump somehow. I recently changed batteries on my old Lenovo T430s and these things started happening.

    This way I found out:

    cat /var/log/kern.log | grep shutting

    And it showed this:

    Jan 10 11:36:34 kernel: [166814.992608] thermal thermal_zone0: critical temperature reached (128 C), shutting down
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  3. If the above doesn't work for you it might be because the current drivers might not be recommended for Ubuntu 18.04 on your machine.

    First remove all current drivers

    sudo apt purge 'nvidia*'
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa

    Try running

    ubuntu-drivers devices

    and install the driver that has recommended next to it using

    sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

    then reboot

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