[plug] Linux.Conf.Au Update.

[Bret Busby]

On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Brad Campbell wrote:

> 
> Bret Busby wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On a 15" monitor with 800x600 resolution, xterm characters are too small
> > to easily read, and, running PINE in xterm would mean that, on those
> > occasions when XWindows crashes, I would have duplicate messages
> 
> Quick question.
> How often does your X session crash?
> As an observation, mine runs 24/7 and has crashed once in the last 4 years.
> That particular instance was due to a stalled CPU fan.
> It does get re-started whenever Debian issues a new distro, but that means
> about 2 re-starts in the last 4 years. (Actually 3 I think)
> Perhaps if yours tends to crash you have a misconfiguration.
> 

It happens maybe a couple or a few times a month; generally when I am 
visiting a wonky website, that freezes a web browser, and causes 
XWindows to hang, requiring a shutdown -r, when the mouse non-dominant 
button does not work, to let me kill the application. Some website 
appear to have built-in code to sabotage Linux web browsers.

One of the more common crashes, occurs when I use Netscape, and the 
Internet connection is lost (we are on 4hr minimum dialup - it is not 
worth going into another discussion about the advantages of ADSL, here). 
When that happens, Netscape spits the dummy, and says "If I can't use 
the Internet, you can't use XWindows". The hanging is not always 
resolved when a new Internet connection is implemented. I seldom use 
Netscape now; I mainly use galeon or Opera as my GUI web browsers, and 
lynx for accessing web pages with URL's sent in email messages. I use 
Netscape, or Mozilla, which is bigger and slower to load, from memory, 
only when I want to send an email to an address in a web page, 
especially when for whatever reason, I want the message sent with a 
return receipt request, or when it is one of those HTML coded email 
addresses with things like the subscribe instructions built in to the 
message that is automatically generated. I also use Netscape or 
Mozilla, to send messages that include text that I copy and paste from 
web pages, such as news items, as a means of keeping an electronic copy 
on my system, of the news items (eg, the one in NZ, where they have 
found a way of doing blood tests without using needles to remove the 
blood - Star Trek kind of stuff).

I generally shut my system down, whenever I will not be available to 
manually shut it down if the power goes off, unless I am doing a 
protracted download.

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
  Chapter 28 of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Douglas Adams, 1988
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