Linux is not more stable!!!!

I recently installed mandrake 8.1 and the install went over without a hitch. But now I begin to notice problems similar to windows. First Konquerer would crash on me for no apparent reason. Second I crashed the OS twice in one day, just by trying to fix the system clock. Finally after the computer was on for three days straight, the modem just stopped working. I had to reboot to get it to work again. Gee this seems a lot like windows 98. Maybe before you linux lovers praise linux, you should warn others that it has problems too.

hmmm thats new.. i really havent tried mandrake but i do want to try it.. why not use Red Hat? and oh.. u want a system that would never crash? get debian or other text based linux O/S coz thats why most linux monkey oeople say that linux never crash its coz they use the txt based versions..

I've used a lot of different OS's but most of all linux and I have to say that of all of the distro's mandrake caused me the most problems. If you don't mind a text based install then try Slackware which worked perfectly for me. I find Red Hat is a good compromise, you get lots of handy, graphical tools and a stable system. If your'e feeling really brave you could try FreeBSD, it's a bitof a steeper learning curve but it never once crashed when I have been using it. I hope this helps you, one more thing linux.org have a BIG list of distros.

I've been using linux for 1 year (SuSE) and it has
never crashed on me.All OS have thier problems but
M$ beats all systems hands down when it comes to
crashing and programming holes.Linux at least makes an effort to fix these problems.M$ it seems
like with every distro they spit out seems to have more holes than the last,and you have to wait for
M$ to issue you the patch because its closed source.With linux and other open source OS you can
fix those holes yourself,providing you know how to
code.Even if you dont code a patch is avalible
fairly quick.

Another thing is that you might have a misconfigured box,because linux doesn't crash all
that often if at all.I had my box up for 4 months
once without a reboot.

Lucky for us we have linux cause If M$ is all we had,I would stop using computers rather than use
such a useless OS.

Criminal

As if my problems werent bad enough, after I wrote the last message I went to disconnect from the internet, and everything just froze. I couldnt use my mouse or keyboard. I ended up just shutting it off and turning it back on(not a good idea with linux). It seems that linux hates me as much as I hate windows. Maybe Ill try macOS next. Who know maybe I can make it crash too.

Everything will crash if the computer's not up to it!!

If you're trying to run X and a 3D game on a 386 with 2 MB RAM for example, its bound to crash - even if it *is* running Linux. I use Mandrake 7.1 and I have had no problems with it at all - It has been up and running for 27 days, 4 hours and 54 minutes without crashing once, and I use that computer as a normal workstation, server for the network and it's only a P120 with 32 MB RAm and an 8.4 GB HDD.

Linux is definetly more stable than winblows, try using RedHat 6.2. It's my favorite :)

Reasons for systems crashing is not entirely due to the OS (operating system). I have a Mac Clone (OS 9.1 -- present machine at time of writing), a RH 7.1 (sans gui since I will be doing entirely command line with it), Windows 98 machine, another mac and a Yellow Dog Linux (powerpc linux) with gui installed.

Everyone of these machines have crashed at one point or another. Sometimes it is the OS, sometimes its an ID-10-T Error (look at this for a second... you'll get it.. ;).. ), sometimes its a hidden hardware problem (e.g., overheating, dust, bad components claiming to be good components, etc.).

So unless you are 100% sure that its the OS never make the assumption. That said not all linux versions are good much like not all windows versions are good nor macintosh versions (although I can happily say I've had this machine up and running for two years without a crash -- I've had one reboot due to OS upgrade -- MsMittens knocks on wood). I throw caution about Red Hat 7.2 as a colleague of mine said that it was worse than Windows 95.

If you want to find some more linux versions to play with check out http://www.linux.org/dist/english.html for your selection of different versions. One for every palate.

`uname -srm'
FreeBSD 4.2-STABLE i686

`uptime'

8:15am up 236 days, 2:14, 1 user, load average: 0.03, 0.04, 0.01

hmmm... been a while since I rebooted this machine. Still going strong though.

`uname -srm'
Linux 2.4.16-grsec-1.9 i686

`uptime'
8:16am up 6 days, 7:34, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.01, 0.00

Okay not as long for this box, but it's very nice and crisp.

You know what I think audioluv, I think you should give Linux another try. A misconfigured system is going to be unstable on any hardware using any OS. Properly configured, there is nothing more stable than Unix based OS's.

Take a look at dmesg and see what it has to say. The kernel will tell you when it's in trouble. Look at syslog too. If you need help reading the logs or tracking down the problem just say so in this same thread. I think that you will not only find that Linux is far more stable if configured properly, but the users are knowledgeable and helpful.

Don't give up that easy.

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8:15am up 236 days, 2:14, 1 user, load average: 0.03, 0.04, 0.01

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I'am impressed.

My Linux box never crashed (some prog's may have caused some trouble, but I never had to reboot the thing for it). I can _not_ present some stats cause I don't let the thing use power for nothing. I'am *green* you see. I switch it of from time to time. Don't shoot me for that.

I believe linux is stable (even on a slow box), at least more then Windowz.

my linux box never ever crashed.... so i don't know why you have a problem (used to use mandrake now using redhat) my windows box used to crash all the time.... but, upgraded to xp and it haas been more than a month with out rebooting and *no* crashes. a nice improvement

Gee..... I run Mandrake 8.1 on my main system, and I've never seen anything link that. Perhaps, before you go claiming it's the OS, you should post what hardware you installed it on, as well as what programs in particular you had running (besides the ones that crashed).

Happy Hacking

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Originally posted by gaxprels
Gee..... I run Mandrake 8.1 on my main system, and I've never seen anything link that. Perhaps, before you go claiming it's the OS, you should post what hardware you installed it on, as well as what programs in particular you had running (besides the ones that crashed).

Happy Hacking

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The machine I use is an intel celeron 533 mhz with 288mb RAM. My hard drive is about 8 gig and the only other accesories I have is a cd burner and a network card. The only programs that I was running during the crashes were Konquerer web browser, and kde media player. I am beginning to think the problem might not be the OS, and might be the power supply.

Check your powersupply's fan. If the fan isn't running the supply is definitely bad. If it is running, it could still be bad, but it's harder to check without special hardware/software. Also, did you upgrade anything, recently? If you did (and it was RAM) that could be your problem.

Happy Hacking

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Originally posted by VictorKaum
I'am impressed.

My Linux box never crashed (some prog's may have caused some trouble, but I never had to reboot the thing for it). I can _not_ present some stats cause I don't let the thing use power for nothing. I'am *green* you see. I switch it of from time to time. Don't shoot me for that.

I believe linux is stable (even on a slow box), at least more then Windowz.

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Nothing's wrong with that theory but *NIX is made for uptime. That's why we win the uptime wars against NT and such. What sucked for me was working at a place where the NT admins assigned the reboots (before we got there) and was rebooting the unix boxes, all of them, even the single DNS server (with no secondary, meaning network DNS resolving and booting was down because it was also the bootp server), every week. Why? Because NT has to be rebooted all the freaking time. You'll learn soon enough that you won't have to have it off at all. Last I heard, the longest uptime for a linux box (not unix) was 7 years or something. Yes, it is stable, yes it can go for days and days and days...

But if you want some configuration tips to ensure its performance is the best you can get, feel free to ask.

Under NT people there is always some applause when some1 says he / she didn't had to reboot in 90 days

Linux and Unix ppl speak in years.

:D

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Originally posted by audioluv
I recently installed mandrake 8.1 and the install went over without a hitch. But now I begin to notice problems similar to windows. First Konquerer would crash on me for no apparent reason. Second I crashed the OS twice in one day, just by trying to fix the system clock. Finally after the computer was on for three days straight, the modem just stopped working.

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The big diifference between Linux and Windows is the price. Linux is free! You can't argue with that...

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Originally posted by VictorKaum
Under NT people there is always some applause when some1 says he / she didn't had to reboot in 90 days

Linux and Unix ppl speak in years.

:D

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This is so true...being the only unix admin on the hall with 9 NT admins, I'm always having to laugh at someone for what they call 'stability'. Also, me and my boss (senior unix admin) handled 45 servers ourselves, and yet the NT people need 9 for 60? Haha, they'll never catch up...

And yes, I blatantly make fun of NT admins as they always try to push the "Microsoft rules the environment".
And free is good! And Open Source is better! Woo!

ok a little hint boys and girls... long story short

as long as you meet or better yet exceed the hardware requirements of the O/S.. you are less likely to come accross crashing it..

if i install win2k on a puter wid 64MB RAM.. heck surely it will crash coz the minimum requirement of it is 128MB RAM...

but since i added 128MB more which would give me a total of 128 + 64 = 192MB RAM.. it has never crashed since.. :)

I was running Windows 2000 Pro for a long time, and it was crapping out on me daily, up to 3 or 4 times a day. I finally got sick of it the other day and removed it, and did a clean install of Windows 2000 Server. It doesn't crap out as much, but still dies on me too much for me to be satisfied with it.

I also run a web server on an old 166 running Red Hat 7, and I can count on a single hand the number of times it has failed me. Every time but one, I was seeing if I could make it crash. It wasn't easy. The other time, my cat had been laying on the keyboard for about an hour. I have yet to see a Linux box die without ridiculous amounts of abuse.

As soon as I get good enough with Linux (not too much longer), I'm going to resize the partitions on my hard drive, and begin to switch over to SuSE on this machine. I can deal with the fact that it's not widely-used, and that it's hard to find software for it. If it's more stable than Windows, it makes it all worth it.

did you ever know that there is no perfect operating system built yet in this planet... however, linux is much different in windows. linux depends on how you configure and tweak it.

well you should make your linux configure properly to make it run properly. and of course, linux is great it is widely use in the internet.

I am also using mandrake and have found that the system is more stable than my old windows 98 se machine. I hope that you dont have a hardware problem, but it seems that way since Linux is so stable.

Bahhh linux rocks !!

must be your install or your hardware
either its got early development drivers or
you have some serious hardware problems
are you overclocking ?

i had big problems with Mdk 8.1 it used to crash on
a Cyrix 200 every 3-8 days on me now i have a 2.4.14
and a custom RH7.2 install and it was up for 30 days until
last night which it came down because i needed the sound
card out of it.

along with a few 486's and a P233 and an Athlon 1.2 Ghz
i have seen them all with uptimes > 100 days

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Originally posted by s0nIc
ok a little hint boys and girls... long story short

as long as you meet or better yet exceed the hardware requirements of the O/S.. you are less likely to come accross crashing it..

if i install win2k on a puter wid 64MB RAM.. heck surely it will crash coz the minimum requirement of it is 128MB RAM...

but since i added 128MB more which would give me a total of 128 + 64 = 192MB RAM.. it has never crashed since.. :)

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this is not exactly true the OS should just run like a DOG
eg i have a 486sx/25 with 16MB of ram and
bind on it using 20MB of ram thing runs fine
it swaps a bit but it still does not have too much latency for
doing dns lookups.

if a OS crashes when it runs out of RAM its a bug and makes it relitivly easy to DOS it (try tail /dev/zero)

but only will it really start crewing up is when you really exceed the require ments and the OS spends the whole time swapping ram and never actually getting anything done.

eg 16MB ram and 200MB used

process 1 loads lots of pages back from swap
process 2 does the same
process 3 same
..
process 15 same but requires process 1's ram so they get swapped out again and just keep repeating.

but there are some nice patches to prevent this but it would not work well in an X enviroment. it does this by suspending and swapping all of a process out process out until other finish what they are doing or loads more ram becomes avilable.

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Originally posted by Conf1rm3d_K1ll



The big diifference between Linux and Windows is the price. Linux is free! You can't argue with that...

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and you tend to get better support from linux people just
so long as you dont ask dumb ask questions.

I have Red Hat 7.2 dual-booting with windows on a P-200, 96 meg ram. I haven't had too many problems with windows actually. Linux is quite stable however. It has only crashed once on me.

Outside of open-source and free support from the masses, linux has one big big thing going for it over windows: memory management. That alone right there, if MS decided to ever write an actual good memory management system, would solve a good portion of the problems. A friend of mine told me that he was told by an MS programmer that the term GPF (general protection fault) was the "catchall" for any memory related issues that they had no idea on. Knowing it's still in today (if that's true), what does that tell you?

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I throw caution about Red Hat 7.2 as a colleague of mine said that it was worse than Windows 95.

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a bit of a tangent, but I just thought I'd mention that this is very true - I went back to 7.1, I have a gigabyte of ram yet was running out of memory after running a counter-strike server for 30 min....lots of other memory issues like that too

We use Redhat Linux 7.1 here as a DNS server for our site. It works great and has never had a problem. We run command line interface becasue it is supposidly more secure and less prone to crashing. Its been running for about 4 months now and hasn't missed a packet since. The only reason it was restarted was to allow the kernal form 6.2 to update. I think its a great alternative, especially compared to our windows 200 servers which we use to host the actual site.


I hope your problems don't stop you form using Linux
:)

Yeah, I have a server at the house (server == pc with pretty good hardware) that has RH 7.1 on it, about to go to 7.2. Tridentrue: you can run gui mode if you want, because if anything dies, just about all the time (90%+) the X server will quit on you, taking you back down to the prompt. What you can also do is crank up the server, get into X (startx) and then do control-alt-f1
which takes you back down to the command line yet the server's awaiting if you need it for gui.

But I digress....real men/women use CLI! Currently on mine, I run sendmail, a mud, and various other daemons and it's not had a problem either. X 4 is pretty stable now with support on a lot of video cards so it's not too bad to use.

Anyways, I'll fight to the death on anyone who says NT has it over Linux. Nothing I've seen points me to believe that NT has a service that's better than a similar service (open source no doubt) on linux. File-sharing can be done with Samba with all the restrictions/security you want, email can be done with Sendmail which is a LOT less problematic than Exchange, web servers (we already know where this is going) can use Apache which is Open Source *and* free *and* supports everything relating to W3C standards (cgi,java,javascript,php,etc), and Bind 9 with DDNS is a much better solution (open source and free once again) to WINS, which is a joke all the way around. I'll stop ranting now but I think I've made a point that yes, you can find alternate software packages that are just as good if not better. It just takes jumping off the MS bandwagon.

I've been using Linux and BSD a while now and I would like to know who has decided that there is so much more software available for windows? I personally have never found a job that I want to use a PC for where I can't find software for Linux. Not only that but alot of Linux software will run on *BSD, Solaris, AIX etc. either through Binary compatibility or re-compilation. I think this is great and would Like to see windows software do half of the things linux software can!

I found it hard to resist this thread, I was eyeballing it for more than a week, and this morning I gave in.

The problem with this discussion is that the majority of the folks out there that really love Windows have never tried anything else.

There are a lot of misconceptions about software not being available to Unix users. This is of course perpetuated by those who have never used Unix, and those who didn't learn anything when they did. The only problem a Unix user should have in finding software is deciding which software to use for a particular task. There are so many.

Another observation is that quite a few self proclaimed `computer nerds' from the MS world utlimatley find out that they really don't know that much about networking, software, security , and hardware when they start using Unix. This is Ok, you are coming from an OS with cryptic error messages and you have never actually seen the OS do it's work before, welcome to Unix, there is a lot to learn.

If your computer is crashing, there is something wrong with your hardware, or you have seriously hosed somehting up and have been messing with the system internals without reading the docs and knowing what you are doing. For audioluv I would suggest gettinga new power supply and see if that helps.

If having to read documentation, not being able to get virus's, not being able to fill your system with spyware, having to learn something about computers and how they work, and being able to customize every aspect of the OS pisses you off, by all means return to Windows.

For those of you who have never tried Linux, or did not make a serious effort at it, take my personal challenge to you. Put Linux on a partition on your computer, boot into Linux and stay there for 30 days, do not reboot, or boot into Windows for any reason for those 30 days. Learn to do all of the things that you do in Windows in Linux; email, surfing the web, playing quake, writing a letter or creating a spread sheet etc. Read the documentation, and actually attempt to learn to do all of those things you have known how to do in Windows for years. At the end of the 30 days, boot into Windows and stay there for a week. I think at that point you will pretty much know if Linux is for you, or that you are a Windows user by nature and should continue using it.

Anyway.....Neat thread.

Even without any protection, the last ftp server I ran had an uptime of 215 days...

Then we pulled the plug, after complaints about some divx's in our upload box.

SuSE Linux 7.0

installed and never updated...