Few more ideas: - you can get information about a kernel panic on your text mode console, eg, Ctrl-Alt-F1. Maybe leave the thing like that and wait for it to blow (perhaps starting a compile before switching will help provoke it). - Maybe come up in runlevel 3 and see if it still misbehaves, in case it is something to do with your video card / bios / driver. Neat way to do this is press 'a' at the grub prompt, and append the number 3 to the kernel commandline for that one boot - keep an eye on what dmesg outputs, sometimes there can be a clue printed by some driver. Likewise, look through the boot messages in there after boot for warnings or other ugliness -Andy
I do not run GUI, always in text mode only :) There was only one kernel panic and I could attribute that to ivtv driver (I have seen this drive giving kernel panic randomly in my old 'totally stable' system also) because it has not happened again. The applications (mencoder and gcc and for one time firefox) just crash with segment fault/internal compiler error. Nothing appears in dmesg or /var/log/messages Thanks from Vijay
