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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