Three times.
All three times when I password protected the system. Twice, the system crashed when I inserted a blank CD or DVD while the password protected screen saver was activated. This might have been caused by VMware (which tries to make mounted CDs visible to the guest OS), so I told VMware to not look for a CD and the system didn't crash while the screensaver was active.
The third time, my boss called me in to his office to help him with an email. When I came back out again, my system had rebooted, with messages like this in the logs:
Feb 10 12:24:09 Merequetengue kernel: [ 5852.179340] compiz.real[7047] trap stack segment ip:41024e sp:7fff605b93b0 error:0
Feb 10 12:24:16 Merequetengue kernel: [ 5859.014131] metacity[6971]: segfault at 0 ip 000000000046441e sp 00007fff05278c70 error 4 in metacity[400000+88000]
Needless to say, I'm giving Ubuntu one last chance. I'm going to get rid of Gnome, which makes Windows 3.11 look positively stable, and try using the KDE desktop. Yeah, this means I have to reconfigure all of my wireless network connections again. What a pain.
I can hear the bullshit from the freetards:
- Oh, my system doesn't crash like this so it must be a hardware problem (No, because my system most assuredly does not crash like this when running Windows XP, or CentOS for that matter)
- Well, it crashes because you're a clueless Linux newbie (No, I've been using Linux since June 19, 1995, back when you were playing with GI Joe dolls)
- Maybe you should try harder to make your system not crash (No, maybe Canonical should distribute stable operating systems that don't crash three times a day)
- You must be a paid Microsoft shill (No, please take your medication when you have paranoid fantasies like this)
- You really should buy Linux-compatible hardware (Guess what, idiot freetard, I did. I bought a Dell 1420 Linux-compatible computer)
I'm happy the Linux haters blog is back again. Linux needs less zealots who think the three crashes I had today were hallucinations, and more people willing to look at and resolve the serious desktop usability problems Linux currently has.
Update: the third crash was not, to be pedantic, a crash; while the screen saver was running, something happened to kill the X process. It was, for all intents and purposes, a crash: I had to reboot my two VMware virtual machines and restart all applications before working again.
Kde4 is crap; no GUI network manager (and no way of installing KDE3, which does have a network manager, instead with Ubuntu); XFCE is also crap, with a very confusing menu on right click and no apparent GUI network manager.
My current workaround is to use Gnome, but to turn off all cutesy effects (right click on root window, change desktop background, then click on the "effects" tab) and to use "xlock" instead of Gnome's stupid screen locker (sudo apt-get install xlockmore then run the command as xlock). I also have detached the optical drives in the VMware guests. I'll let people know whether or not this stops the crashes.
