After a bit of googling about, it seems that I'm affected by Ubuntu Bug #111375, which itself seems to be kernel bug #8423. According to kernel.org's bugzilla, this has been fixed, but a new Ubuntu kernel hasn't been compiled yet ( Read more... )

While sputnik runs well enough on a 32-bit 'generic' kernel, I am tempted to try an AMD64 kernel to see if I can get CPUfreq to work properly. It's not that big a deal for me, since I haven't put anything on this host anyway.