Hi Everyone,

I have an old pc with a pentium III 866mhz with 1 gig of ram and modestly small 40 gig HDD. Now my main problem is that when I click on either the Gimp or any of the other apps including Firefox, they go through normal process then after they come up on the screen all of the sudden they are gone and closed like I never clicked on them before. Everything else runs fine except my apps. I was wondering if anyone can help me fix this mysterious problem. Forgot to mention that I have Edubuntu 7.10 workstation loaded on this computer with no other OS on it, just a stand alone computer for my experiences.

Thank you all in advance,

"I wear my TUX to LAN parties!"

FAT2000

I cannot guarantee that I can help (I've been out of the Linux loop for the last 2 years, only just returned) - but, I can get you started - launch any of the problematic programs from a terminal. This will (or should) give you any error messages.
Copy said error msg here.

I really appreciate your help on this. In order to run those programs in a terminal I need to turn on the terminal from the desktop and then copy the screen to a file?

Yes.
Open a terminal, type the name of the program in and press Enter and copy whatever error message (if any) that appears.

Thank you I will try that and let you know what happens. Thank you again.

I tried running the terminal program and when it came up on the screen it decided to close just like all the other apps. Is there a way to run the terminal program in the command line and still be able to scan or print the error information in order to post it here? Thank you once again for all your help.

Have you got access to a Linux Live CD?
If so, boot the machine up from that and see if the computer behaves normally.

The other alternative would be to boot into safe mode and run the system updater from the command line.
(Choose safe mode from the initial boot menu and then log in using your username and password)

Then type

sudo apt-get update

Let it finish, and then type

sudo apt-get upgrade

Then, when it's finished, boot back into normal mode (just type reboot and press enter).

There are other possibilities if this fails.

Well, I tried the LiveCD and it gave me the following message;



So, I went and did the second suggestion you gave me and now when I boot into the desktop all I get is a blank yellow or beige screen I don't know what is going on. There are no icons and no pictures not even the background that I put in there. Just a blank screen with a white cursor. When I ran the first "sudo apt-update" command it stated towards the end of it's process that 4 files could not be downloaded so the old ones were used. then when I did the second "sudo apt-upgrade" command I got a message stated that the it copied 0 upgraded 0 or something like that. What other solutions or suggestions are there? I am leaning towards wiping my HDD and reloading the OS. Anything you offer I want to thank you in advance.

Yes, I think I'd be inclined to reinstall too.

Now if I need to reinstall, how should I go about it? Should I just run the liveCD again? If so, how do I avoid the aforementioned problem?

Or, should I format the HDD and start from scratch? If so, then what is the process of formatting an HDD with Linux partitions? Should I just use the DOS procedure instead and repartition the drive? Thank you in advance for all your help.

Run the Live CD again.
It will format any partitions itself as it installs.

Might be worth giving the Live CD a try out first to see if the Window problem is the same on the disk as when it's installed.

I went ahead and tried the Live CD and I got an error stating the following message;

Now, I tried to do an integrity check on the disc and it still gave me that error. My guess is to reburn the CD at a slower speed, then check the disc before I run it. What do you suggest?

Seems like it's getting progressively worse, which suggests hardware.
Never-the-less, do as you suggest and reburn the disc.

I tried to run the LiveCD and I got an error message stating the following;

Now, I was looking into the possibility that I had a bad ISO so I ran a CD integrity check and I still got the same message. I next tried a fresh download of Ubuntu 9.04 from the Ubuntu site per my buddy's recommendation and I am now waiting for it to finish so that I can burn that one into a CD. I am using CDBurnerXP for this purpose, is there any other possible explanation for this error? My Buddy said that the media that I am using is fine and that maybe I need to check the destination Media Drive to see if that is the problem. I don't know if all the bases are being covered but I am highly perplexed in this regards. I just learned that word from the dictionary. Anywho, What other thoughts do you have for this error? I am going to burn a new copy of the ISO into a CD but this time in a slower speed. In the meantime I am checking the CD drive on the destination PC. The drive is an old HP CD-Writer Plus 7200 series. What do you think? Thank you again for all your help.

Well, here I am again. I have checked the cdrom and it seems to be working properly. I have changed the speed while I burn the ISO into CD from 40x to 16x and even down to 8x. This time I got as far as the menu and then when I select the Live CD process I am back to the old "CRC error" again. Now when I try to run the install I get this message too;

I checked the integrity of the disc and it checks out except for the second copy it just gave me the error message which I assume is that disc that is bad. So, Where can we go from here now? I am running out of options or am I just repeating my mistakes and creating a whole new set or just a different set of problems. I burned another disc with the same burning program and I am not having any issues with those discs. I don't want to say what I burned but trust me it works. Heck I created a backup on CD of my wifes computer or should I say CDs and they all work great. So, I am ruling out the burner that I use to make those Live CDs with. I am making some blue frees-bees to throw around, so far I have eight that do not work. Perhaps a different distro? I did try PCLinuxOS and it gave me the same message as the one I mentioned above. I was wondering if I missed something. Thank you in any case for any help that you have and will probably continue to provide.