Does anything in Linux work *well* 1574

Mark Kent

I realize that technically it's different, but what is the real difference in impact? I went from having 5 or 6 open apps to looking at the blue login screen. There was no session save and any unsaved work was lost (fortunately I wasn't doing anything real critical at the time). The only real practical difference I can see is that a full reboot takes about a minute longer to accomplish. For that matter, I went ahead and rebooted anyway. Who knows what the hell made it do that?

Three years running XP and I can't remember ever seeing the BSOD. I had plenty of apps crap out on me from time to time, but it didn't take down the OS. For the record, it's a 1.5 GHz P4 w256 Meg physical and 512 Meg swap. The disk light wasn't flashing so I don't really think that swap was the problem, but who knows?

The problem with the your suggestion of using top to look for memory leaks is that it would take about a day to open up a terminal window and issue the command. No kidding! Last time it happened I clicked a couple of underlying windows (like you would to bring them to the front) and then went upstairs to watch TV for an hour (CSI was on). By the time I got back an hour later the screen still hadn't refreshed.

I haven't looked at that particular site with Konqueror, but I was comparing Moz 1.7.5 on XP with Moz 1.7.5 on Linux. I'll try Konqueror and see what happens. It really is weird but it's just that one site so I can buttume their coding is AFU.

Yes it is (apples to apples). I'm comparing a home PC under XP with a home PC under Linux. No servers. I don't doubt that a server running a real lean, non-GUI Linux is more stable than any flavor of Windows. For that matter, you could probably bring up a DE (you wouldn't, I know) and all you would accomplish is wasting some RAM. I mean it's not like you are going to be sitting there at the keyboard starting and shutting down apps like you do at your desk during the day.

You really have to pay attention to the comparison I'm trying to make here. Does your car come with a 500,000 mile warranty? Did you know that over the road diesels (18-wheelers) do? That's because starting your engine and going for short trips is the roughest thing you can do to an engine. OTR trucks often run for days practically non-stop (team drivers) and you can put anywhere from 120,000 to 250,000 miles per year on one of those things. The point is that comparing a desktop PC running GUI apps to a server is totally invalid. Just like comparing the running time of a diesel to your family sedan.

I suppose I'll figure out how to set up cron jobs eventually, but the point was that up2date has an irritating tendency to freeze up on me and do other wierd poo. Like the panel icon will tell me I have updates available; I click it and a screen comes up listing several updates. So I click the "Launch Up2Date" button. It does it's thing, checking I'm not sure what, and then informs me that my system is completely up to date. But I still have that list of updates staring at me. So I do it again and this time it does the update. Totally random as far as I can tell.

True, but it's not like you're actually spending 2-3 weeks around the clock doing that. If you're like me you just re-install the apps as you need them. Some never get back on for lack of interest. An occasional housecleaning is a good thing IMO.

My printer for one. I'm lucky that it's an Epson I guess, but CUPS -- as neat as it may be for network printing -- is kind of a pain for a single box-single printer setup.

The modem's a Conexant winmodem and the free driver only lets me connect at 14K which is useless. I only use it as a fax machine and I'd like to set it up for voice (answering machine kind of stuff), but to get that I have to buy the driver.

Xsane *seems* to run my scanner OK, but I have yet to figure out how to tweak the settings to get a decent scan-to-file-then-print copy. It just looks like crap.

I just now, while I was composing this, figured out how to dl from my digital camera. That went better than I expected. Very nice. :)

This thing came with (Fedora's Bastardized version of) OOo 1.1.2. Subsequently, I allowed it to update to 1.1.3. Now when I go to Add-Remove packages it has a check mark declaring that OOo is installed, but when I uncheck it to remove it, it says it can't find it. It's like the system lost track of it. I need to read up on the rpm command to see if-how I can do this through the terminal maybe.

FWIW, I'm taking "Linux for Networking" through my university this semester. I really *do* want to learn. :)

I'm just on the steep part of the learning curve right now.

What I want to figure out how to do is set up an old PII as a diskless workstation running off this machine. I think it has a fried IDE controller because it has a hard time finding the hard drive (I know the drive itself is good). I would probably need more RAM and dig up an ISA NIC for it, if that's possible (not to mention a router). Boot off a floppy. Possible? Worth the effort?