Comments on: How did I ever consider Linux stable?

By: gioby

gioby — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:10:00 +0000

Check whether you (were) using a -rt kernel. You should be using a normal kernel, it must not contain the suffix ‘-rt’ on it. This is the mayor cause for the problem you described, but it is just a matter of choosing the right option at startup.

By: no one knows

no one knows — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:52:59 +0000

i personally think of linux to be a good os because of its openess in editing its source code. if you downloaded the copy of linux over the internet from an unreliable source, chances are it has been meddled with

By: Thomas Mailund

Thomas Mailund — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:28:53 +0000

I always use the upgrades rather than re-installing, but whether this is what caused my problems I have no idea…

By: Paul S

Paul S — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 03:26:50 +0000

Did you recently “upgrade” your Ubuntu distribution?

A few months back, I had a perfectly functioning distro of Ubuntu “gutsy” 7.1 on my IBM Thinkpad T23. When the update manager offered to upgrade my distro to “hardy” 8.04, I did so. That is when all hell broke loose. Crash, crash, crash. I couldn’t do updates without it locking up, etc.

So I did some research on the new distro. All I found were rave reviews on how great “hardy” was. Finally, after alot of looking, I found out that the problem was not with the distro, but as a result of upgrading my distro through the update manager. Apparently, the upgrade install had some serious issues. The only way to get a stable install is to do a full, fresh install. Having to reinstall my OS from scratch was a big annoyance, but it has been stable ever since.

I don’t know if this is helpful, but I felt compelled to share my experience.

By: Alejandro

Alejandro — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:40:30 +0000

I’m glad you seem to be fixing your problem. Still, I would suggest trying Slackware for x86 or a derivative (i.e. Bluewhite64) for x86_64. Slack is awesome for its simplicity and it’s rock solid. If you want massive speed out of the box (sort of speak) and don’t mind the time for downloading/compiling, go for Gentoo. BTW, Gentoo install can be speed up using the Sabayon distro.

By: lol

lol — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:17:31 +0000

Linux used to be more stable before Windows 2000.

By: Thomas Mailund

Thomas Mailund — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:01:48 +0000

lefty: just the comment just above yours ;)

By: lefty.crupps

lefty.crupps — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 13:08:16 +0000

any news?

By: Thomas Mailund

Thomas Mailund — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 08:16:44 +0000

Hey hey hey, I’m a happy man this morning. I followed Marc Paradise’s link (thanks Marc) and tried to follow the instructions there, but when it came to swapoff, I got this nice little error:

$ sudo swapoff -a
swapoff: cannot canonicalize /dev/disk/by-uuid/d00bfdb4-c541-4d56-8448-b0a13ce352a8: No such file or directory

Hmm, that doesn’t look good.

A bit of googling found me this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=802398

and updating /etc/fstab seemed to do the trick.

I’ll do a bit of stress testing and see how it works, but I am pretty optimistic.

Thanks for all your suggestions, guys! Much appreciated.

By: Thomas Mailund

Thomas Mailund — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 08:06:14 +0000

Shamil: I have 1G of RAM but 2G of swap, so I could try to fiddle with that…