I am really new to linux, so a lot of questions will be stupid. Please do bear with me. I have got two questions:

1) I caant run many programs concurently inn Fedora. A uname -a gives
Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 #1 Thu Jun 2 22:55:56 EDT 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
My processer is Pentium III , 700 MHz and the system memory is 192 MB.
What i mean by many programs is a adobe reader and 5 tabs of fedora get the system to really slog down.
Also, Just five minutees ago, i treied to start eclipse and lo! hang again !!!!!
I have 11 services running in the background, most of which i thought would be required. All webservers etc are turned down.
What can i do? Are the specificatoins not met? PLZ HELP

2) I download many packeges using yum. While the download process is in middle, i had to restart the computer many times (due to the above problems). When i reestart yum, all the previous packeges are again scanned. This does waste a lot of time (you see, i have dail - up connection) Is there any way to avoid this?

3) Is there anything similar to alt-cntrl-del sequence in linux, that brings something like task manager up (as in windows). OR, Whats the way to deal with a un resposive program?

Thanks in advance.

Maybe you need to add more ram to your system. 192MB is not enough if you are going to be running resource hungry apps.

You could try using xfce instead of Gnome or KDE. It's less pretty, but should run faster.

To deal with an unresponsive system, you could try the command 'top' on the console. It will tell you which programs are using the most CPU time. You can then kill unresponsive CPU hogging programs using the command 'kill' (you might also find the command 'pidof' useful to the get the pid of the program you want to kill).

Are you running as the root user?

If you are this is generally considered a bad idea for system security and stability, particularly as a new user it can be really easy to break your system when running as root.

The reason I ask is you mentioned the system hanging when you ran eclipse and there was a bug in FC4 that caused the system to lock up when running eclipse as root. The bug can be fixed by running yum update.

already updated to ubuntu way back.
But that was really nice info about the bug ..........
thanks.