I hate to say it, but Ubuntu has, so far, proven extremely unstable. It’s possible that it’s my hardware that’s at fault, I suppose; but since completely reinstalling Ubuntu last night, and not really having done anything really crazy with the system, I’m getting segmentation faults on some major applications (Firefox, anyone?) after only having the system running for an hour or so. After a reboot, the segfaults disappear for awhile.
This is somewhat less than excellent. I’m going to forge ahead a little longer with Ubuntu, but if I don’t find a fix for this, I guess it’s either
- Try out a new distro; Slackware or Arch Linux, perhaps? (A little risky; could be a lot of work just to find that I don’t like it).
- Go back to Gentoo Linux…
The major drawback to going back to Gentoo is the horrendously long installation process… I don’t mind so much, but my wife is not crazy about it. ;-)
The major advantage is that as long as you do sane things, everything works perfectly.
This is a persuasive argument.
Indeed, Ubuntu’s been quite a trip for me too. From having to add the name of the host to the etc\hosts file with no access to the root account (had to use Ubuntu live), to not having access to printing and having the computer horribly stuck after attempting to hybernate, I’ve seen it all. It is a nice, slick distro, but not ready from prime time, yet. I am planning to write a review about it soon… Any suggestions for a good, stable, not hard to install and compatible with off the shelf wireless adapters (the only reason why I decided to use UBUNTU)?
Sorry, no immediate suggestions… Gentoo has actually been, generally speaking, the best performing distro I’ve ever used. It isn’t “hard” to install (the documentation rocks) but it does take awhile due to the “compile (almost) everything from source” methodology.
I hear good things about Arch linux, and it is a pretty quick install — perhaps look through their forums to see if your wireless adapter is supported.
Thanks for visiting!
Strange - I’ve not had any serious problems with Ubuntu on my laptop, nor on the desktop that my wife used to have. And hibernate is working fine since Breezy came out.
Never had it segfault on me - it does sound like a hardware fault - perhaps overheating?
I’ve had no segfault trouble for awhile… I’m not sure what would have fixed it, though, so that’s not too comforting, yet.
The crashing seemed to occur when I was using and OpenGL screensaver — since I stopped using one, it hasn’t crashed. That’s a little disappointing, though, as there is no reason that using an OpenGL screensaver should cause your machine to crash…
It’s been working well since I wrote the above post (so, for about 2-3 days now), so I’ll give it another chance and see how it does.