Surprised and Disappointed

[Steve Meyers]

On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 11:05, Chuck Allison wrote:
> Last night when trying to use Mozilla I got all kinds of strange 
> graphics garbage and had to reboot (shades of Windows here). 

There are a few problems with this assessment of the problem:

1. This is a problem with Mozilla, which you blamed on Linux.  I've had
similar problems with Mozilla 1.3, hopefully they'll get it fixed soon.
It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, clearing the cache
usually does the trick.

2. Why did you reboot?  That is your Windows background coming through. 
With most problems on Linux, a reboot is not necessary, it usually just
requires you to restart the application in question.


> This morning I came to my Linux box and saw a frozen screen saver - I 
> had to cold boot! As a Windows guy, this is just deja vu all over 
> again. Isn't Linux supposed to be more stable than Windows? I usually 
> don't have such problems with Windows installations this early in 
> their life cycle!

It could be your video driver.  Some of the screen savers use OpenGL,
and so if the video driver has some 3-D issues, you may have some
problems.  How to fix this would depend on what your video card is.

Again, about the reboot thing - did you try CTRL-ALT-BKSP?  That will
kill X-Windows (the real culprit here, not Linux).

Screen savers are pointless, anyway.  I have mine set to simply blank
the screen.  If you're using Gnome, I don't know how to change them.  In
KDE, it's in the Control Center under Look and Feel.

Steve