my so-called "stable" linux system crashes more than my windows system.

why is this?

it's never while doing anything big either, usually just looking through directories and such. sometimes it even stalls before the boot-up completes

i would really like to remedy this, but don't even know where to start.

i'm running a dual-boot system with lilo on floppy, the linux is mandrake 10 on hdd with 40 GB total.

any help or suggestions is greatly appreciated.

What kind of video card are you using? I've found that a combination of certain video cards, AGP, and crappy motherboards can lead to instability in the graphical system. What exactly happens when it crashes?

I tried Mandrake (9.0) a while ago when I was trying out distros. It wouldn't boot on my Abit-KT7 RAID motherboard; I suspect it was a problem with ACPI. I've used Knoppix and Kanotix continuously since then with no problems (at least not with the motherboard), and Slackware too.

Try an easy-to-install Debian variant like Libranet or Mepis.

Mandrake 10 does have some issues, esp with the KDE sound system. I disable the KDE sound system on all the boxes here and it's been okay. Also some trouble with lock ups with usb flash drives, but not sure what is the best solution there... The standard mdk 10 installs I have here are otherwise stable with uptimes in weeks at least.

I still run Mandrake 10 on this box, but with a generic 2.6.7 kernel as it's easier to run some of the things I run with a self compiled kernel. With the generic 2.6.7 kernel and some of the auto stuff removed I have no trouble with the USB flash drive.

Anyway, what system. video, etc you run?

I am running a dual boot with WinXP with an ASUS A7N8X mb, w/onboard NVidia sound, 512 RAM, just got upgraded to an ATI Radeon 9600 video card from an NVidia GForce 4 Ti. But it was crashing in similar fashion before the video card upgrade. I'm also using a USB drive, but have not had any problems with it that are noticable.
Running Mandrake 10 w/ KDE as a testing server. (Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc.)
Its usually not when I'm doing anything specific, just happens at random intervals, usually when I'm searching through directories, although I have noticed that if it happens once, it will more likely happen again until I boot up and immediately shutdown to provide it with a "clean" shutdown. If it does happen, it WILL stall while performing the file integrity check. I have yet to get through one of those without a stall. It has also stalled several times on boot up.

Don't think it would be that big of a problem if there were some Linux form of Ctrl-Alt-Delete to save the system, instead of having to reboot every time.

I'm at the point right now where I'm going to try out Fedora Core 2 and give that a try, see how I like it. But I really like Mandrake and would like to know about any install secrets that I might use to remedy this problem the next time I install Mandrake.

anyway... thanks for your replies and hope to recieve more.

The ASUS A7N8X seems to be a problem board with mdk for some reason. Maybe other linux's as well. I'd be tempted to try a generic kernel from kernel .org on that one or a different distro I don't have one here to play with and I'll be buying a soltek MB for the new system and not the A7N8X as I have had no trouble with mdk on the soltek... Compiling a new kernel is not a big deal, tho getting many of the mandrake features going on a generic kernel is sometimes hard - tho some of those 'features' seem to be where the stability problems are

well, unfortunately, getting a new MB is not a solution i can afford right now.

I'll just have to try a different distro as figuring out a generic kernel is not within my abilities at the moment.

thanks for the info tho.

I wouldn't get a new MB either and would try to find something that works. Not sure about fedora but there is also slackware and others...

kernel compile can be tricky, but not as hard these days as you would think. The config is mostly point and click but the trouble is knowing what to click on

exactly

anywho... im gonna give FC2 a try tonight and see how that goes.

FC2 is working awesome!! havent had one breakdown yet... it started to choke when i had like 10 windows open and was browsing my huge windows drive, and changing settings, but it came back without crashing, and haven't had a full crash yet.

thanks LQ, you're my hero.