[vox-tech] X crash, Mozilla

Peter Jay Salzman p at dirac.org
Wed Jul 21 18:31:57 PDT 2004


On Wed 21 Jul 04,  3:24 PM, Nick Schmalenberger <nschmalenberger at fastmail.fm> said:
> list,
> Sometimes when I switch from a text virtual console to X the computer
> will freeze It will respond to Ctrl-Alt-Del. Other times, the screen
> will just be darker than usual, but I can still do things. I lost some
> data last night and again today because of the freezes. Once today X
> just crashed back to the text console where I started it, and so I
> restarted X. What can I do to make X more stable? Twm is my window
> manager if that is important. The only bad thing I can see in
> /var/log/XFree86.0.log is:
> PEXExtensionInit: Couldn't open default PEX font file  Roman_M
> Since X seemed to work anyway, I'm not sure that is important. (BTW, I
> had to type that in by hand because I don't know how to copy text
> between windows in X. Is twm just not capable of that?).

jeez.  that's awful.  some thoughts:

1. what distro are you using?
2. what X version are you using?
3. anything extra printed to the console where you started X?
4. what video card?
5. have you tried google?

twm is one of the more stable and speedy window managers.  you can
certainly cut and paste in twm.  isn't it mouse buttons 0 and 2?

despite twm's light weight, stability and quickness, try a different wm.
i like enlightenment, but many people used to use windowmaker.  although
twm is about as stable as they come, you need to start eliminating all
possibilities, no matter how unlikely.

> Secondly, in Mozilla when I am going up or down in a page or backspacing
> in a form, Mozilla will keep going for a while after I let off the key
> if I had been holding for a while. I imagine this is because the
> interrupts have sort of piled up because they are being processed by
> Mozilla slower than the key is sending them. Dillo and less do not do
> this. Why is this and what can I do about it?

let me make a suggestion.  try opera.  you may hate it.  you may love
it.  at one point, opera was, by far, the fastest browser on earth.
nothing could hold a candle to it.

at one point, galeon came close to being as fast as opera, but the
developers totally screwed galeon up.  gnome 2 was the worst thing that
ever happened to galeon.

i recently tried mozilla again (firefox) and i have to say, i was really
really impressed.  firefox on windows appears to be just as fast as
opera on windows.  however, on linux, opera still feels faster than
mozilla.

anyway, just give opera a try.  if it doesn't solve your problem, you
can always go back to mozilla.



another thought about your X problem:

get yourself a copy of knoppix and live with it for awhile.  just long
long enough to convince yourself of either one of two things:

   1. yes, the X problem persists with knoppix.

   2. no, the X problem went away with knoppix.

once you're sure of which statement is true, post back to the mailing
list and let us know.

pete

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