First thing I did before installing Fedora was read the #fedora faq on freenode, which pointed me to a few known issues like with 3com cards and kudzu. Next thing I did was spend some time on bugzilla regarding bugs that could be specific or applicable in my case. When I decided I wanted to 'learn' Linux a couple of years ago, I reinstalled Redhat 7.2 on my gateway at home, and chose no extra packages whatsoever, plain simple ~500mb install. From that point on, anytime I'd need something I'd have to install the appropriate package and figure out how it works. I think that's what helped me most, and I highly recommend doing that on a pc you will need regularly; that'll push you to fix it. Learn vi and you can do anything from that point on. Avoid gui configuration tools for now, if you plan on migrating quite a few PCs to Linux, that means remote administration, which in turn means vi and ssh. Sure there's vnc and all that, but the bottom line is when I want to restart httpd on a server, I'm not gonna start a vnc session for that. This is my very humble opinion. On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 15:30, Matt Morgan wrote: > I'm fishing for some ideas about where to start diagnosing a > mostly-random crashing problem. > > First off, let me say this is a 2.8Ghz hyperthreading pentium 4, 512 Mb > of DDR400 ram, an Asus motherboard (not sure of the exact model), a WD > 80 gb drive, and a Sony CRX225 CD-RW. I have a 3COM 3C905b 100baseT > network card (there's also an SiS adapter built-in that I don't use), > and an ATI Radeon 9200SE video adapter. The sound built-in to the > motherboard appears to be a SiS i810_audio. > > This is a fairly new computer for me, I've had it maybe 10 days. I've > only been a Fedora user for about a week more than that (temporarily > used a different computer before getting this one). For a couple days > after installing FC1 on this computer, it ran very well, except that I > couldn't get XFree86 to deal properly with the video; it would only work > on Generic VESA, not with the Radeon 9200 driver. Then I set up yum and > turned on nightly updates; the next morning the computer froze, just > after login, while KDE was starting up. During rebooting, kudzu found > the video adapter and set it up for me. So now all the hardware is > properly identified and working, and I thought, great! That's worth one > measly crash. > > Only the thing is, now it tends to crash a lot. Almost every day since, > the computer is either frozen when I come to work in the morning, or > freezes during KDE startup, just after I login. Then less often, it just > freezes in the middle of working. For example, it froze when I tried to > tell Firefox 0.8 to use gpdf instead of xpdf to open a pdf--just > clicking on the "Other ..." button froze everything. Then this morning, > it froze in the middle of typing an email message in Thunderbird 0.5. > > I wanted to blame it on yum, thinking it didn't happen until I set up > nightly yum updates. But it happens even during mornings that yum > installed nothing overnight. So that seems like a red herring. > > My primary goal in diagnosing this problem is not just to fix this one > computer. I plan to switch my entire organization to linux over the next > couple years, and I need to get a better idea of how to diagnose > crashing on linux desktops. So my real question is: when your computer > crashes, what tools, and what steps, do you use to diagnose the > problem(s). You know, what log files, what common culprits, etc. Of > course, if you have specific suggestions about how to fix this > particular computer, I'm all ears for that, too. > > Thanks a lot, > Matt
