...STILL trying to get used to and comfortable with linux, with rare success, yet another question:

as title states... when i open up synaptic to manage software pkg's, it seems to be crashing now, never used to.
say i want to upgrade gedit as an example which causes this:
- i right click the item in the list
- click 'mark for upgrade'
- a window comes up, as appropriate, stating that there are other required changes to be made when upgrading this package, which synaptic handles
- i click 'mark', and the program closes..

also this seems to happen if i click 'cancel' at the same prompt. is there some sort of log i can check to give you details for you to guide me with this problem?

another thing, some packages 'require' that another package has to be removed, usually quite a few too... i never upgrade those packages because i thought it would remove other programs and will screw up my system. i should trust synaptic and continue, when this happens correct?

it never seemed to crash right when i started using ubuntu, but thats probably just cause i didnt really use or KNOW of synaptic.

i upgraded the kernel with synaptic last week or so to 2.6.10 686-smp, and im running of course ubuntu.

oh ya: synaptic is v0.53.4, and there is an update in the list for v0.55+.. but i dont think i can upgrade it because it brings up the window that crashes the program :S

in general actually.. when im using my ubuntu partition, the software i use seems to crash with no visual reason [ex firefox, gaim, xmms [although not in while since i updated kernel if that even has anything to do with it :S].
i always just blame linux for this saying its rediculous for people to call it so stable, but that cant be the case considering the # of users.. but i like to blame it anyways ;p

is it just my sysconfig i have on this install that makes ubuntu not like me? i know i dont have something setup properly already.. my vid card, resizing and other gui things seem choppy.. oh well that isnt relevant.
is there any customary/almost mandatory modifications you should do to every lnx install, to prevent all these instabilities? sry for my ignorance of the topic but i do agree its the future and want to get a headstart [at least over the others who dont know what linux is]

thanks for any help..

Hi there,

You slightly miss the point on the stability front. Linux (the OS kernel) is very stable if you use the older stable versions. You are using the very latest version which has a few bugs around, but it's worth it for the features and speed. On the other hand, how often do you have to reboot because your entire system has stopped working?
The application which run on Linux (eg Firefox) are no more stable than the Windows versions, sorry :-(

Anyway, I think I can help out with Synaptic. Get into a root command shell and type:

apt-get update
apt-get -u install synaptic

That should get the latest version, which may well fix the crashing bug.

TIM

sorry i uninstalled linux again, lol.. and wasnt watching this thread

thank you for the iinput, however

i am now running ubuntu newest preview version 5.04 hoary... and it is very nice!
no probablys as of yet though