Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

BC · 2008-01-29 22:34:09

I understand this is a really broad question, but why is it that most distros won't work for me but a couple work flawlessly?

I found that most distros I tried were plagued by constant crashes. I'd be going along, doing whatever it is I was doing and I'd get a hard freeze. It usually happens within an hour or so (i.e. often enough to consider that distro unusable). I can't reproduce a crash at will, but I know when I'm using certain distros a crash is right around the corner. Now I don't know if it's a kernel panic, but everything just freezes. As I understand it the keyboard's num/caps/scroll lock LEDs blink when you get a kernel panic, and my LEDs weren't blinking. The logs I checked never seemed to show any errors. The only two distros that never crash were openSUSE and Fedora 8. Here are the distros that I've used in the last two months that didn't work for me:

Ubuntu
Kubuntu
Gentoo
Arch
Mandriva
Debian

I guess another way to ask the question is, what's different about those two distros that make them more stable for me? Is it just the kernels? Could it be something else? I'm not really sure what to look for.

I'm looking forward to any suggestions,
Thanks.

phrakture · 2008-01-29 23:07:31

It sounds like you have some unstable hardware there. If there's no commonality to lockups and hangs (like Flash, or Firefox, or something) then it's most likely you RAM or something. I'd say run memtest if you can

lilsirecho · 2008-01-29 23:12:34

It surely sounds like a memory problem for much of the time.

Check your memory use in the OS that crashes.

bender02 · 2008-01-29 23:17:51

Yea, I'd say your processor overheats, or there's a problem with RAM. When the processor fan on my desktop machine stopped working, it was that: random freezes/reboots.

Or phrakture might be right: when I put 1G RAM into my older fujitsu laptop (the upper limit fujitsu specified), it started to freeze at random intervals. I checked the RAM with memtest, all was fine. Then I talked to a hardware guy, and he was saying that on a fujitsu he's seen, the voltage on RAM was somehow low, so that it couldn't bear more RAM. I tried also 768M, but also freezed. So I was stuck with 512M.

ozar · 2008-01-29 23:37:12

Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

Yep, definitely sounds like some hardware issues are going on with your machine. I've tried nearly 50 different distros over the last 7 years and none of them have crashed at all, much less constantly. That's not to say that an app doesn't crash or hang now and then.

BC · 2008-01-30 00:00:08

That's one of the things I don't understand about my problems. If it really was bad RAM or overheating, wouldn't it affect -all- distros I tried?

lilsirecho · 2008-01-30 00:23:28

It also depends on what is running in the background and each distro is different>>>>

lilsirecho · 2008-01-30 00:48:10

Enter "free" in terminal to see what size ram in use. EDIT: The right command is ...free -m .....

Last edited by lilsirecho (2008-01-30 03:39:58)

pauldonnelly · 2008-01-30 01:54:49

You might take a peek at the capacitors on your motherboard too. I've seen bad caps introduce some pretty baffling intermittent crashes. I'd leave the machine on to test it and it would be fine, or I'd play a game for a while and it would be fine. Didn't even suspect the real problem until I had the case open for a completely unrelated reason and happened to spot it.

jacko · 2008-01-30 02:45:07

pauldonnelly wrote:

You might take a peek at the capacitors on your motherboard too. I've seen bad caps introduce some pretty baffling intermittent crashes. I'd leave the machine on to test it and it would be fine, or I'd play a game for a while and it would be fine. Didn't even suspect the real problem until I had the case open for a completely unrelated reason and happened to spot it.

but, this again will point to hardware failure. Once I determine something is broke on my machine I always have it double checked on other machine or swap out hardware to test if new hardware changes old behavior.

I agree randomness = hardware failure/ over heating issues.

tigrmesh · 2008-01-30 03:38:12

I experienced similar freezes when my laptop's fan died.

Maybe those other distros do CPU Frequency Scaling by default. Check out http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Cpufrequtils.

phrakture · 2008-01-30 05:17:50

BC wrote:

That's one of the things I don't understand about my problems. If it really was bad RAM or overheating, wouldn't it affect -all- distros I tried?

Not necessarily. It's happening to a _majority_, and that's enough. It may be that Fedora throttles your cpu speed by default, and thus it doesn't overheat. Or maybe it loads some shared libs that just happen to skip over the corrupt chunks of memory. It's a gamble, but hard lockups on this scale screams "omg hardware" to me.

schivmeister · 2008-01-30 19:49:13

case $distro in

Ubuntu)
distros like this aim to achieve a one-size-for-all platform. With Linux and GNU, and generally FOSS, the goal is still quite a distance away. Thus, hardware issues are almost always existent.
;;
Arch)
distros like this will try to make ammendments where possible and needed, but you need to make sure yourself whether things will work. If things don't work, you need to be your own teacher and arrive at a conclusion, positive or not.

esac

BC · 2008-02-02 00:40:23

Ugh, I originally had a longer post but then, like an idiot, I accidentally closed my browser. I'm not gonna write all that again, so here's the short version:

The RAM was okay, it was overheating a little. Problem is fixed now, thanks everyone for your insight

shining · 2008-02-02 08:07:29

BC wrote:

Ugh, I originally had a longer post but then, like an idiot, I accidentally closed my browser. I'm not gonna write all that again, so here's the short version:
The RAM was okay, it was overheating a little. Problem is fixed now, thanks everyone for your insight

What did you do?

Arch Linux

#1 2008-01-29 22:34:09

Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

#2 2008-01-29 23:07:31

Re: Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

#3 2008-01-29 23:12:34

Re: Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

#4 2008-01-29 23:17:51

Re: Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

#5 2008-01-29 23:37:12

Re: Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

#6 2008-01-30 00:00:08

Re: Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

#7 2008-01-30 00:23:28

Re: Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

#8 2008-01-30 00:48:10

Re: Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

#9 2008-01-30 01:54:49

Re: Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

#10 2008-01-30 02:45:07

Re: Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

#11 2008-01-30 03:38:12

Re: Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

#12 2008-01-30 05:17:50

Re: Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

#13 2008-01-30 19:49:13

Re: Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

#14 2008-02-02 00:40:23

Re: Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

#15 2008-02-02 08:07:29

Re: Why do most distros (but not all) constantly crash?

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