[plug] Ubuntu 8.04

[Kai]

Hey Paul !

Paul Antoine wrote:

 >-- snip --<

> Many of the "randomly" behaving PCs I have encountered lately (running 
> either Windows or Linux) have done so due to memory going bad... 
> sometimes just one bit somewhere high in memory which gives stable 
> performance for ages until a program loads into it.  Sneaky eh?
> 
> So I now routinely run the Memtest86 from the Ubuntu boot CD as soon as 
> anyone says their machine is in any way flakey.  I figure it's a good 
> way of establishing a baseline level of confidence in the hardware 
> before spending hours poking at the OS.

I run memtest this morning while I was ironing, doing housework and 
other stuff...no memory errors over a two hour period.

> I've not seen websites upset GDM/X and it's been a while since they 
> upset Firefox badly... Pidgin is still upset by MSN occasionally, but 
> then you kinda expect that as IM interoperability is a pain.

Mmmm, ok, never had any crashes when using Trillian on WinXP SP2 on the 
same machine.

>> I know I have some bad sectors on my secondary SATA drive, I figured 
>> that may be a cause for the random crashes, however my cousin has the 
>> same problem. As mentioned he's running the i386 release and totally 
>> different hardware overall, but he's experiencing similar problems.
> Are your problems just similar (random crashes) or exactly the same (the 
> very same apps fail in the very same way.)  I ask because *similar* is 
> just not enough when diagnosing hardware/software faults.  Repeatable is 
> all that matters (hence the need to eliminate memory problems as this 
> can be a barrier to repeatability.)
> 
> I think you really do need to do something about the bad sectors before 
> you go much further in analysing the problem on your machine!  (And do 
> the memory test just to be sure.) A new 500GB drive is just $92 after 
> all... ;-)

Might be only $92 but I'm full time (40 hours/week) at aviation college 
where nothing is cheap. That's my rent for a week so if HDD is the 
problem I might have to put up with random crashes for a little while 
longer :P

> I assume you are completely up to date on all updates?

 From what I can see, yes...tried refreshing Synaptec to make sure it 
reparses whatever file(s)/sources it checks to make sure I've got 
everything... Is there a button somewhere I can click that says "Dear 
Ubuntu desktop n00b, here are the updates you've missed, you tard" ? :P

>> My cousins converted himself from Vista to Ubuntu after seeing me 
>> using it and saying "what's that ?! I thought I thought Linux was too 
>> hard to use....etc", I initially gave him the Live CD and although 
>> that was good for a first glimpse it doesn't give an idea of true 
>> reaction time for programs to open and all that. Anyway, got the all 
>> clear from his old man and we have Ubuntu dual booting with Vista - he 
>> says he likes Ubuntu better than Vista... (but his old man's a Windows 
>> man, so better not say it too loudly :P )
> Good work on the conversion ;-)

Actually, he asked me to install it 'cause even off the LiveDVD it runs 
faster than Vista does on the machine he uses. With the OS installed on 
an old HDD it works light speed compared to Vista, then again, that's 
prolly Vista being Vista. No idea how fast XP works on that machine 
anymore, it got "upgraded" from XP ages ago.

Funniest thing is though, my cousins school teacher emailed him some 
stuff MS Works .wps format, two machines in the computer room at the 
back are both running Vista and Office, Office can't open Works files 
but OpenOffice did, so, he downloaded the email on Ubuntu, opened it in 
OOo, saved it as .doc and .odt then saved as PDF and sent back to his 
teacher. I thought that was just gold :)