This system is a PentiumIII 600MHz with 128MB RAM in a genuine Intel motherboard. No strange hardware, recent Netgear PCI LAN card, ordinary ATA CD-ROM drive and floppy, SIS-300 graphics chip, and that's it. Took me about a day and a half to install RH7.3, get samba running and setup Apache. Its fairly stable so long as I connect via SSH from a remote terminal or move files via samba (I edit on a Win98 box). I used to leave it on for weeks at a time. But I like to use the KDE email reader to check my server logs etc, and gradually I noticed a correlation between using that and system instability. Now I shut it down every night and minimize my KDE/Gnome usage, so the effort to figure out the problem is more than that of avoiding it. I have a RH8.0 box set I was going to upgrade to, but heard that RH major releases tend to be the least stable (what the !?!?!). I think the open-source community is like the Bizarro world of computing, to borrow from Sienfeld. Just the same, I love a free lunch. I guess I just have to chew carefully. --Phil M. ----- Original Message ----- From: Alan Dayley To: Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 4:28 PM Subject: RE: Good Bye Gnome, Hello KDE, I hope > Occam's Razor applies here. > > On a particular box Linux is unstable but Windows 98 is stable. Why? > > Is it more probable that thousands of other installations of that same Linux distro version are also unstable and the users are lying about the stablility? > > OR > > Is it more probable that the particular computer has odd or flakey hardware or some other issue that the particular Linux distro version does not handle well? > > There is some flakey or poorly documented hardware, especially in some older PCs, that just don't run Linux correctly. IMO Linux actually pushes the hardware harder than Win98 ever will. Marginal chips or vendors that won't release required information make it hard to write good drivers for some hardware. > > OTOH, it could be something else. :^) > > Alan > > -------Original Message------- > From: Tom Achtenberg > Sent: 06/12/03 01:08 PM > To: "'plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us'" > Subject: RE: Good Bye Gnome, Hello KDE, I hope > > > > > Phil, I had the same problems with my RH 7.3 box. It was much less stable > than my Windows 98 box! I finally gave up. I'm now trying Mandrake 9.1. > It took 4 days and several attempts to get the install completed without > errors. (Found the disk 1 iso on the Hawaii mirror is bad too.) I haven't > had much time to work with it yet, but it has been a disappointment too. > Mandrake update doesn't work to start with. The whole task bar at the > bottom of the screen keeps disappearing too. Only way to get it back is to log > off and log back on. This same box would run for weeks on Win 98 with no > errors. I have not even tried to connect to my file server or printers yet. > If I cannot do it without manually editing files I'll probably just put > Windows back on and forget about Linux for a desktop. > > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: > http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss