Ray Racine wrote at 06/24/2012 07:11 PM:
I don't think it is Racket related. I'v experienced a few 100% cpu lockups on the latest Ubuntu, including once or twice when building Racket.
FWIW, I've built 5.2.1 from source a few times on Debian for x86 without problem, as have consulting clients of mine for various versions of Ubuntu on 32-bit and 64-bit.
Side comment: for development workstations and servers, I'm generally happier with Debian (the stable version) than with Ubuntu. For example, I once found that Ubuntu introduced a small DoS vulnerability in Apache somehow (Debian didn't have it), which caused one of my clients some headaches. I couldn't find any Ubuntu developers who understood the problem I was reporting, but Debian developers I talked with understood immediately. This helped confirm my earlier bias: I think of Ubuntu as more for less-technical home users than for software techies. I've seen people go Ubuntu because Debian was already proven for then, and Ubuntu essentially offered Debian with the respectability of support contracts. And perhaps Ubuntu could be for corporate desktops that for whatever reason aren't running RHEL or CentOS, and that want to give their users something more slick-looking than Debian (and without their users getting Debian guilt-trips if they want to run closed-source bits). Debian has also seemed better with security updates (and I sometimes give sys-admins at Ubuntu-using clients a heads-up on Debian security advisories), though I haven't compared the distros in that regard recently. If you're accustomed to pretty Ubuntu, you might find Debian more homely, or in need of more tweaking. (Or, if you're using XMonad and avoiding most Gnome crud, you might not much notice the different in look between the two distros.)
Neil V. ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
