Ubuntu/Gnome stability

[Myles Green]

On Sat, 2004-11-12 at 22:42 +0100, Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
> > I installed IceWM-experimental, it's _very_ fast and light
> 
> Just tried it (again, was in Synaptic ! :-).
> I was impressed by the ability to change window manager literally 'on
> the fly'. I was impressed, until I switched to metacity and lost the
> bottom bar iwth no way to log-out to get back into Gnome....had to
> reboot the machine !!

heh, yeah, metacity's pretty bare-bones all by it's self.

> > Hmmm, I haven't run into that yet. Must be a YMMV case.
> > Are you running warty or hoary? I have no stability issues here.
> 
> Do you mean that in 6 weeks of using Warty, yo never had any gnome
> application or applet crash and disappear in thin air 'just like that',
> without even using it ? If so, then please give details of your
> hardware ! :-/

LoL! You mean six _days_? THat's about how long I've been using
Ubuntu... I'm a slackware guy at heart, started using it around version
3.1 (or was it 3.2...?) 

My hardware? Athlon 1800+, Shuttle AK37GT2-R mainboard (266Mhz FSB), 1GB
DDR RAM (333Mhz), nVidia Riva TnT2 M64 w/ 32MB VRAM, SB Live! audio and
4 Maxtor UDMA133 40GB 7200rpm fluid bearing drives... oh, and a 450W
PSU. Nothing too fancy. The only app to just go p00f! was gdeskcal
<shrug> but it used to do that every once in a while with slackware too.
I'm pleased to report that I like Ubuntu enough to seriously consider
this a permanent switch - for this, my personal box, plus as many boxen
that I admin as I can get away with (not that that is a huge number of
boxen... but still :-)

> Yes, I am using Warty (downloaded ISO image as soon as it was available,
> 20th October IIRC ?). My PC bascially runs the following all day long :
> 
> 1) E-mail (Evolution)
> 2) Web browser (Epiphany)
> 3) CD Albums (OGG, Rhythmbox)
> 4) MP3 songs (XMMS or Totem-xine)
> 5) Picture viewing (GQview)
> 6) Plus a few Nautilus windows and a couple Terminals
> 
> Plus TV and Bluefish and Gimp occasionnaly when needed.
> 
> I have 1, 2, 4 and 4 crashing all the time !
> I usually get at least one or two crashed each and every day.
> Today I had XMMS that 'disappeared' after several hours, for no reason.
> Then I had Evolution crash when I tried to paste a couple lines of text
> from a terminal into an e-mail I was writing to you earlier tday (the
> result of the locate command for libxfcegui...). Evolution often does
> this.
> Sometimes it's Epiphany that also disappears in thin air at random, just
> because it feels like it.
> Same for Rhythmbox, it disappears every now and then.
> Same for XMMS.
> 
> Never had problems with GQview or Gimp, as far as I can remember.
> 
> However the worse than happened to me, is GNOME doing the same ! Yep,
> all of a sudden, whole screen would turn black and bring me back to
> GDM !!! Really scary, happens about once a month.

This might sound silly but... have you cleaned the dust-bunnies etc from
the inside of your case, especially from the fins of your CPU cooler and
the front air intake, lately? I usually have at mine every other month
or so just because I live near heavily used roadways (well, I also have
a Persian cat that sheds LOTS of hair). You might want to check your RAM
as well - Ubuntu does include Memtest86+ which works very well. Let it
run through as many passes as you can (24hrs is good enough).

> If really Wart and Gnome 2.8 is stable, then this statement made my day,
> my week, month...year ! This is truly fantastic news, this means Gnome
> is not as bad as some buddies would like me to think...
> Maybe it's due to hardware problem then ? Is there a way to trace a
> program's activity so that we have debug informations when it
> crashes/disappears ? Who knows, maybe we could fix the problem.

Well it feels pretty stable to me on my hardware. It helps to have 
debugging turned on at compile time if you want to debug, not sure if 
the packages that make up Ubuntu were or not.

Take care,
Myles

-- 
Myles Green <rmg57 at telus.net>
Calgary AB Canada
Ubuntu Linux 4.10 "The Warty Warthog"
My GPG/PGP public key is available on this site:
http://keyserver-beta.pgp.com/
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