on Sat, Oct 19, 2002, Jim McCloskey (mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu) wrote:
>
> Browsers are still so much the weak link in the Linux chain.
I disagree strongly:
http://twiki.iwethey.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/NixBrowsers
...Galeon kicks ass. MSIE is a pale fourth or fifth behind other 'Nix
browsers. Mozilla's a decent choice in a cross-platform environment.
OTOH, I may skew results by disabling Java, Javascript, and most plugin
support. Give me a straight browser. I tend to shoot Galeon
periodically (once a week or so) to clear memory leaks. Otherwise it's
up for days with 20-100 tabs in multiple windows.
Your main issue appears to be X11 stability.
> I use Debian woody, with X11 4.1. Kernel 2.4.18, hand-compiled. I have
> Galeon, Mozilla and Opera installed and I keep hopping from one to the
> other hoping to find one that will sort of basically work most of the
> time.
>
> I've been using Galeon for a while. It sort of basically works most of
> the time, and it looked nice to begin with, but over the long haul you
> find out that it's flakey. Too often, it just quits and disappears
> without warning (especially in the middle of tasks like printing or
> calling acroread). That's annoying, but it's not as bad as when it
> just locks the system, like tonight (the third time this has
> happened).
Apps shouldn't lock the system, though X11 (which talks directly to your
video card) may well. You'll have to provide more detail on just what's
failing:
- No application response under X11, but mouse pointer moves or
keyboard LEDs (e.g.: capslock, numlock) toggle: probably a window
manager problem. Try restarting or signalling it. E.g.:
WindowMaker will restart when it gets a SIGUSR1. You can usually
switch to a console with <ctrl><alt><F[1-6]> in this case.
- No video response, but you can remotely access the box (network or
possibly serial console -- your Palm Pilot's good for this if
there's a waiting getty). You've got problems with your X11
configuration, possbily bad driver or mismatched card & configs.
> I was trying to buy something; I updated the `shopping cart', and
> everything froze. Galeon froze, and the X server froze. No response to
> keyboard input, no response to mouse events, no nothing. Ctl-Alt-Fn
> did not bring me to virtual terminal n; Ctl-Alt-Del did not kill the X
> server. Ctl-Alt-Backspace did nothing. Nothing, in short, did
> anything. Switching the monitor off and on just brought me back to
> where I had been.
Power cycling the monitor won't do anything.
Sounds like your problem's X11, not Galeon.
> But the machine was not dead. I was able to connect to it from my
> laptop by way of a Netgear hub, DHCP, and ssh. From there, you would
> have thought everything was fine. I killed every process in sight,
> hoping I would regain access to the console and the keyboard. I killed
> Galeon, killed all the other X apps that had been running, finally
> killed the X server .... all useless. The monitor, the keyboard and
> the mouse were all locked hard and unresponsive. I switched the
> monitor off and on again; the same frozen scene greeted me.
This is typical of a hung X11 session. Some people have reported that
(re)running SVGATextMode can clear problems like this, though I've never
had luck with this. The issue is that your video card is locked. Most
of the time, the only solution is to reboot the ssytem. Sometimes a
hard boot is required (I've seen this with Sony Vaio laptops).
> But there was nothing in the logs to indicate a problem of any kind.
> Nothing even said `An error has occurred.' Eventually I gave up and
> rebooted the system remotely from the laptop. If I hadn't been able to
> connect from the laptop, I would have had to just switch the thing
> off.
Check:
~/.xsession-errors
/var/log/XFree86.0.log (or appropriate display number)
... *before* you start a new X session, as the files will be
overwritten.
> . are there any other tricks I could have pulled to regain access to
> the console and the keyboard, short of the Windows-like last resort
> of rebooting? Happily, there were no other users on at the time,
> but that was pure luck.
Possibly magic-alt-sysrq, but my experience is that this works best from
a console. You're doing pretty well there.
> . are there any browsers out there that don't give rise to this sort
> of problem? I maintain 6 Debian machines here (about to add a
> seventh) and ill-behaved browsers are the source of most of the
> problems, complaints and lockups I have to deal with.
X11's your problem. Though you may try running Galeon with 'strace' to
a file:
strace galeon >galeon.strace 2>&1
...though this will slow performance considerably.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
TWikIWeThey: Technology, free software, GNU/Linux, and a little bit
of everything else: http://twiki.iwethey.org/
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