On Sun, 2003-02-02 at 16:42, Pat Roche 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.
Well, I'm glad you love Linux. It's just too bad your having these problems. > 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). This is strange. In general Linux crash much less than Windows does. Is it just web browser that causes a crash, or all internet applications? I'm thinking it might have something to do with your network card. Although I've never heard of a network card crashing an OS, I would check to make sure that you are using the correct Kernel module, and that the network is configured properly. It could also have something to do with X and your video card work around. Take a look at /var/log/Xfree86.*.log. Check to see that it is loading the correct drivers and that there are not any major problems that you can see. Warnings will be marked WW and Errors will be marked EE. I would also take a look at /var/log/messages and see if there are any errors around the time that your computer last crashed. You can also try quitting X and working in the console with a web browser like lynx. That should tell you if it is a network or X related problem. > 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. My guess is that it's not the web browsers themselves that are causing the problem. In my experience Galeon, Konqueror, and Mozilla are rock solid. The only browser that crashes on me is Opera, but it never takes down my whole system. > 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 If a program hangs you can always try and close the window, or run xkill and then click on the application window. Another thing you can do is open an xterm and kill the application. For example: # killall evolution > 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. You might want to do more testing in Windows because if it turns out that Windows crashes as much as Linux, then you probably have a hardware problem. Maybe your processor is overheating. I would also set it up to use your new video card, just like in Linux so you can see if that is the problem. One thing to try in Linux is when it crashes try hitting Ctrl.-Alt-Backspace and see if you can restart the X server. You can also hit Ctrl.-Alt-F1 and see if it will take you to a console. Then you can kill the app that is hanging and restart your X server. Also if you have another machine on the network you can try sshing into the frozen machine. If you can get in, you can try and fix it, or at the very least restart it properly. > Another quirk in Linux: the hard drive sometimes runs for three minutes > for no reason. When it does this try typing top into an xterm. This will give you a real time list of the programs that are consuming the most resources. You can then kill the offending application, and maybe take steps to prevent it from running in the future. > Also, Evolution is very slow (maybe 10 seconds) opening HTML e-mails. Is > this normal, or possibly related to my Web-browsing problem? That's not normal, but I don't know what's causing it. > Any comments or anecdotes (e.g., your own experience with bundled, > brand-name systems, both positive and negative) will be much > appreciated. I have a Dell Inspiron 3800 and I have had problems with it. First of all it comes with an integrated modem/sound card. The modem is a winmodem so I had to add a PCMCIA modem to get it working. The sound card was not supported under 2.2 Kernels so I could not use it until 2.4 came out. The monitor was not supported under the first distro. that I tried on it (Corel Linux 1.0), so I had to plug in an external monitor to get it to work. It was however supported by RedHat 7.0. Since then the keyboard has broken, so I have to use a ps/2 keyboard. The speakers have broken so I have to use external speakers, and the battery is broken so I have to keep it plugged in all the time. So no, I would not recommend buying Dell laptops. As a general rule of thumb, you will get better support from desktop systems then from laptops since laptops often use non-standard hardware. Good luck, Jesse
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
