>>...it will require a "fairly heroic leap" to develop a completely stable machine.
>>Strange, my PC hasn't crashed the OS since 1997. Must not be a hardware
>
>Is a machine running Linux gauranteed to be "completely stable". AFAIK, no. Thats what Craig M. is talking about.

Well, speaking from experience, I'd say yes. Because I beta test apps as part of my LInux community spirit contribution, I run and test a lot of beta software. However, even beta apps, when they crash (usually seg fault) have not crashed or locked up my Linux box. For GUI apps what usually happens is that either the app dies and control is returned to the desktop or, for console apps, control is returned to the command line. On those rare occasions when control is not returned to the GUI or console, I usually do an "Alt-F2" blindly and a login pops up. On occasion a character mapping is corrupted and I have to type "reset" followed by the enter key, in the blind, and then normal characterization returns. Also, on occasion, a service, fork, or some other artifact is left in memory and all I do to clear it is issue "kill -9 " where is the program id revealed by a "ps aux" command or, on the KDE desktop, I run SystemGuard, which is like task manager, where I can clickon the errant pid and delete it.

I never give a thought about the kernel crashing. It just doesn't happen to me, even though I compile my own kernels to add or remove features I want or don't need.
JLK

Nebraska Dept of Revenue