Does anything in Linux work *well* 1575

Huge if you're running any kind of served process at all. Linux is extremely good at multi-user multi-tasking, so you might have all kinds of things going on on the machine.

I do a lot of stuff on the console, so I wouldn't want that end.

I actually find X pretty stable, in fact, I can't recall the last time I had an X crash, although it was whilst using the nvidia driver and doing something openglish.

I don't think it BSODs any more, it'll do the same thing as my WinNT5-2K machine, which is a random reboot instead.

This is a fault - I've never seen *anything* like that at all, and I've seen a few linux problems over the years. You can get this effect with out-of-control processes, eg:

#!-usr-local-bin-slowme slowme

This will exponentially divide until it eats up all available resources.

Afairc, the kernel should kill anything which tries to grab more memory than is available, which is why I think that you might have a faulty machine.

What about the automatic mail collection, automatic downloading of security patches, raid array, updating man pages, locatedb indexing, cron-at, etc. etc?

One of the things I've found with using Linux is that I don't shut things down all the time, because I don't need to. Also, I do a lot of work from the console, and I'm sometimes attached to remote machines as well.

As an interesting example, I work from home, and use adsl to connect to my work lan. The modem I was supplied with requires a login from the win2k-nt machine. Whenever it crashes, I lose the link, which is a complete pain as I have to go through a tedious VPN re-verification once the machine has started up again. In the end, I bought a separate adsl modem firewall, because I was so sick of this.

When I used dial-up (before we got adsl for home working), I moved the dial-up to a linux machine for precisely the same reason, every time the windows machine crashed, I had to go through the very tedious verification process. Once using the linux machine, even if X did die, I wouldn't lose the link.

I think that you incorrectly buttume that the only thing of importance a computer would be running would be your user app - this is not the case.

Which is why shutting down-rebooting is a bad idea, even for a desktop and a machine crash is so huge.

I have a couple of landrovers, myself, and expect them to last many many years. Oh yeah - they're diesels, too. They are well capable of handling 500,000 miles, indeed, around 70% of all landrovers ever made are still on the road - a truly unique achievement.

Sorry - can't help there - have you tried a redhat mailing list?

True.

Unfortunately, it does grab significant chunks of 'real work' time in doing so, as well as raising frustration levels.

Yeah, but not because someone's set fire to your house :-)

I've never used cups, so I've no idea. I do find printing a pain, generally, but it never seems to work very well in Windows either. I use lprng for the network I run, it's been very stable.

Err, 14k4 is the fastest fax rate, isn't it? why would you need to go faster for a fax server?

Not tried sane.

I've had generally good results with digital cameras.

Redhat mailing list?

Hehe - have fun!

It was quite daunting at first, once I realised that I could actually track down and fix most problems, it became a real plus for me.

Booting off a floppy would be the easiest way to get it up and running, after which you could nfs-mount everything. It's not difficult, and these documents talk you through a setup: Diskless-root-NFS-HOWTO.gz Diskless-root-NFS-other-HOWTO.gz NFS-HOWTO.gz

Either they'll be on your machine inusr-share-doc-HOWTO, or if not, they're on the LDP site. Let us know how you get along...

Oh - if you can get hold of a boot rom for your NIC, you might be able to do a complete netboot without a floppy: Network-boot-HOWTO.gz

-- Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk You don't have to know how the computer works, just how to work the computer.