[ubuntu-in] Big Mystery. (Also need help)

[Prateek Sharma]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 5:30 PM, Vishal Rao <vishalrao at gmail.com> wrote:

> I remember many years ago of people on the Internet with the same
> story. The thing back then is that Linux+GCC "stress" and utilise RAM
> much more "efficiently" thereby almost always touching all bits and
> triggering the problem. I'm guessing you have Windows XP and if you
> tried Vista you might get the same problem due to things like ASLR
> (Address Space Layout Randomisation) and what not.
>
> Ah, just Googled and found this link:
> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/faqs/GCC-SIG11-FAQ
>
> Snippet from the link:
>
> "  QUESTION
>
>   Nothing crashes on NT, Windows 95, OS/2 or DOS. It must be something
>   Linux specific.
>
>  ANSWER
>
>   First of all, Linux stresses your hardware more than all of the above.
>   Some OSes like the Microsoft ones named above crash in unpredictable
>   ways anyway. Nobody is going to call Microsoft and say "hey, my
>   windows box crashed today". If you do anyway, they will tell you that
>   you, the user, made an error (see the interview with Bill Gates in a
>   German magazine....) and that since it works now, you should shut up.
>   Those OSes are also somewhat more "predictable" than Linux. This means
>   that Excel might always be loaded in the exact same memory area.
>   Therefore when the bit-error occurs, it is always excel that gets it.
>   Excel will crash. Or excel will crash another application. Anyway, it
>   will seem to be a single application that fails, and not related to
>   memory.
>   What I am sure of is that a cleanly installed Linux system should be
>   able to compile the kernel without any errors. Certainly no sig-11
>   ones. (** Exception: Red Hat 5.0 with a Cyrix processor. See
>   elsewhere. **)
>   Really Linux and gcc stress your hardware more than other OSes. If you
>   need a non-linux thingy that stresses your hardware to the point of
>   crashing, you can try winstone. -- Jonathan Bright
>   (bright at informix.com)"
>

Wow Vishal thanks for the link. While i agree about the different
resource-usage policies of the two kernels, does it warrant an order
of magnitude difference in stability under the circumstances.
Anyways, mine is a laptop, and i'll see if i can atleast refit the
ram. Maybe a loose connection/dust somewhere?