This happened often enough that I'm sure the machine was locking up.  
Video playback stopped.  So did music.  Any game I might have been 
playing stopped.  It wouldn't respond to pings.  Ctrl+alt+delete did 
nothing.  Ctrl+f1 did nothing.  Trust me.  It locked up.  Slackware just 
works.  Even though I have to compile some programs and this takes some 
time, in the end, they work.  I won't mess with the other distros.  Also 
the others had trouble identifying and configuring either the audio, 
video or both.  Kubuntu would ID the monitor and give me 1600x900, but I 
had to mess with the audio.  Debian would get the audio right, but it 
acted as if the monitor was 4x3.  The others had varying problems.  Once 
I got the audio and video working, I'd install vlc and there was trouble 
with it playing audio correctly and resuming audio playback after 
pausing and unpausing.

When I installed slackware and ran it the first time, the video was 
correctly configures and so was the audio.  When I installed vlc, it 
played audio when resuming playback after pausing.  I'll stick with 
slackware as long as I have this machine.  When I eventually get 
another, I'll try the others again.  I really liked being able to type 
in apt-get install whatever and have it running a minute or two later.  
But that doesn't do me much good if I can't watch a Firefly episode all 
the way through.

I'm sure slackware isn't for everybody, but I'm glad it's there.

Derek


On 01/07/2013 05:57 PM, Brian Cluff wrote:
> Just curious; are you sure that it was actually locking up?  It might 
> be that something was making the X server become unresponsive, but the 
> machine, as a whole, was just fine.
> Recently my machine was "locking up" a lot, but it would only do it 
> when I was listing to music.  It turned out that there is a bug in 
> Amarok that if it tries to play an MP3 file that has 0 size. that it 
> would crash, and it turns out that if it crashes after the screen has 
> blanked that things go bonkers and nothing responds.
>
> ...but it turns out that I could still ssh into my machine from 
> another computer and investigate what was broken.  Turns out that when 
> I went to recover a bunch of MP3 files from some CDs that were about 
> 20 years old that when it couldn't recover the file it just wrote out 
> the name of the file with nothing in it.
>
> In any case, I've found that Linux almost never locks up, it just 
> becomes unresponsive from the desktop, to the point that CTRL+ALT+F1 
> won't ever do anything for you, but ssh/telnet will almost always get 
> you into the machine and let you identify and kill what is causing the 
> problem.
>
> The only reason I mention this is that is you find that Slackware 
> won't do it for you in the long run, there may be hope in getting one 
> of your previous distros to work for you.
>
> Brian Cluff
>
> On 01/07/2013 02:42 PM, Derek Trotter wrote:
>> Some of you might remember of the last few months me posting about my
>> system locking up running linux. This last Saturday marked my system
>> running slackware for a whole week without locking up once. Before this
>> I had tried Kubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora and Centos.
>>
>> I'm guessing Slackware has something the other distros I've tried don't
>> or the others have something Slackware doesn't.  There has to be some
>> difference.  Any ideas what it is?
>>
>> Thanks
>> Derek
>>
>> -- 
>> "I get my copy of the daily paper, look at the obituaries page, and 
>> if I’m not there, I carry on as usual."
>>
>> Patrick Moore
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
"I get my copy of the daily paper, look at the obituaries page, and if I’m not there, I carry on as usual."

Patrick Moore