Hi Pat.
The crashing rate is above avarage for sure.
I would suggest the following barring faulty ram and or faulty hdd.
See if you have enough diskspace, browsers tend to use up (large) amounts of
diskspace to cache webstuff you access.
df command should do the trick, If your home partition , if you have one
seperate, and you should, must have atleast 100 megs free, mozilla for
starters defaults to 50 megs for chache size, the others are not mutch
different.
If you have a single partition for your home and root (/) , the exhustion of
disk space could lead to unpredictabel behaviour (crash) when (/) gets full.
also check /var/log/messages . This is the (main) logfile, see if there are
any error messages, they are usually very helpful in situations like yours.
Changing your hardware would most definately improve on the situation. Most
of the (built-in) cards are slightly different then their stand-alone
counterparts, and not being able to turn-off / diable yours is cairtinly a
very strong indication of your problems.
So my initial suggestion is a log reading, find some error messagegs relating
to graphics_display_adapter or anything else. I have seen really strange
behaviour from motherboards like yours.
Cheers
Szemir
On Sunday 02 February 2003 16:42, you wrote:
> I've been using Red Hat 8.0 on a Dell Dimension 2350 (2GH Celeron /
> 512MB RAM) since early January. Bottom-line impression: I love Linux.
>
> But there's one problem I'd love to resolve. Linux has crashed while
> surfing the Web, on average, at least every two hours (during at least
> 50 hours total browsing).
>
> Konqueror seems more stable than Galeon and Opera, and all seem somewhat
> more stable than Mozilla. There's little consistency. Mozilla, for
> example, crashed on the third page I accessed today (Yahoo News); but
> when I rebooted I surfed that page and many others for more than an hour
> without hanging.
>
> Meanwhile, I've worked more than 40 hours in OpenOffice Writer and can
> only recall it hanging once. Evolution rarely hangs and the CD player
> (kscd) hasn't crashed yet
>
> To compare OSes on the same machine, I've spent about 15 hours surfing
> in Windows 2000 (using Opera, Internet Explorer and Phoenix) and had
> only two crashes -- a much better average than Linux. In each OS,
> control-alt-delete won't force a reboot after a crash.
>
> I usually work in KDE, but didn't document any improvement during about
> four hours in GNOME (on Mozilla, Opera, Galeon and Konqueror).
>
> Another quirk in Linux: the hard drive sometimes runs for three minutes
> for no reason.
>
> Also, Evolution is very slow (maybe 10 seconds) opening HTML e-mails. Is
> this normal, or possibly related to my Web-browsing problem?
>
> BACKGROUND: Inside the Dell box, there are NO CARDS. Everything -- video
> controller, network controller, etc. -- is embedded in the motherboard.
> (Luckily there were three empty slots.) The video controller -- which
> wouldn't work with Linux -- could NEITHER BE REMOVED NOR DISABLED.
>
> As a non-technical person, I was in over my head long before this point.
> I'm much obliged to CLUG member Johnny Stork for coming up with the
> various workarounds that enabled me to use Linux my new computer. (I
> just wish I'd talked to him before buying the Dell.)
>
> The workaround Johnny came up for the video controller was to set up a
> dual-monitor system and to designate the new video card (HIS TNT2 M64
> PCI) as primary and the built-in video controller as secondary. (So the
> original controller which couldn't be disabled is now outputting to a
> non-existent monitor.)
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions? Do I have any options beyond selling
> the new $800 Dell at a discount to my brother-in-law (who prefers XP)
> and starting from scratch on another new computer??
>
> Any comments or anecdotes (e.g., your own experience with bundled,
> brand-name systems, both positive and negative) will be much
> appreciated.
>
> Thanks for reading. Sorry it's so long.
>
> Pat
