Ive heared all about Open source stability...

why is it that a simple program (netscape web browser) can crash the whole system ??

for example, 10 minutes ago, i clicked "search" on the yahoo home page, netscape stoped responding, so i hit its minimise button so i could kill it through the system monitor, but as soon as i hit it, the whole system hung, evenything, even the mouse stoped responding.

why ???

im loving my new Linux OS. and although i have to reeboot FAR les often than when i used windows, windows never hung so bad i had to reboot by pulling the power plug...

You might have kept on going, maybe restart the X server with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, or use another login screen, Ctrl+Alt+Fnumbers1to6
Which window manager were you using?

Good question ... it never managed that for
me so far ... what were you doing?

Cheers,
Tink

ALL key shortcuts died.
the system just TOTally 100% hung.

EVEN the caps lock light stoped working (the 1 on the keyboard that comes on when u hit caps lock.

Im using REDhat 9 (fresh install, no updates (yet))
and the KDE desktop.

(still quite new to linux, but getitng quite comfortable with the normal day to day tasks)

graphics card, java?

Cheers,
Tink

What CPU do you run? If it's a duron, you need to pass mem=nopentium to the kernel as the AMD and AGP memory can confilct and lock the computer.

Bad memory can as well, but I have most often experienced reboots with that.

Don't use Netscape as there are much better browsers available.

Mozilla, galeon, firebird and opera all beat netscape imho.

I just noticed you were running Redhat 9.0, their latest release. I had it to lock up on me overnight even after updating. I reverted back to 7.3 and I am OK again.

It's a good idea for a newbie to stay a release behind the latest but they go for the bleedin' edge latest buggy releases for their first experiences.

I suggest downgrading to Redhat 7.3 and wait until they come out with Redhat 10.whatever. Then Redhat 9.whatever should be stable after updating

Hm... I'm a newb running Redhat 9, and no problems so far... except for my stupid display. But thats because Nvidia won't let me download the drivers... it keeps telling me there's an error and I have to try again.

I would recommend what fancypiper wrote and try another web browser, Also sometimes non-gpl kernel modules can cause problems and lockups for example: graphics card drivers and modem drivers have caused lockups on my machine.

Graphics card = ATI Rage 128 (using r128 driver)
Memory = 256 meg DRAM 233mhz
Processor = 1.3GHz AMD-K7 Athlon (i686)
running the latest stable Java SDK

i found that linux also hangs wen i try to mount a disk in my cd-re-writer /dev/cdrom1

Ohh, 1 more question.

Has any1 ever managed to download an update via the redhat network icon thing without getting a too busy error ???
or am i gonna have to pay for it ?

I recently made a comment about how stable Linux was. Well, I should not make too big a deal about that because apparently not all Linux boxes are stable just like not all Windows Boxes are unstable. Win 2000 and XP are much more stable than earlier versions of Windows anyway.

In about 1 1/2 years of using Linux I do not recall X-Windows ever locking up on me until tonight while posting this message. Several minutes ago an error message popped up and nearly everything locked-up. I pressed CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE and about 5 seconds later I had exited X-Windows and was back at a command prompt where Linux itself was still working perfectly. I typed startx and about 10 or 15 seconds later was back to using Gnome and here I am again.

On rare occasions I have had individual applications lock-up but was still able to continue using Gnome and all other programs. In most cases I can just close offending applications and restart them. I have not learned how to use the kill command to kill a misbehaving application or process but it might help in those situations.

Sometimes I am too critical of Windows. Last spring I took a class where we each had a computer running Windows XP and within XP we used VMware to run Linux and Win 2000 all simultaneously. While typically running two or three of those at once, all were totally stable during the entire semester. I am a part-time student and have a student ID card and could get the less expensive student version of VMware. I would like to get the version of VMware that uses Linux as a host and try running Win NT 4.0 from within it. I hope that combination will work as well.