no, it is not a rant: I would appreciate help on this one. I newly installed Mandrake 8.0 on a new machine which does not include windows (yet), so this time one cannot blame microsoft (damn!). Linux, or maybe more precisely xwindows/KDE has crashed on me several times already and that puzzled me. I had to make a hard shut down which of course I'd like to avoid (I wouldn't want to have to reinstall everything again). the situation is like this: I run one application when I suddenly notice that in the background the whole desktop disappears, meaning the desktop icons, the control panes and even the window's frame (with the resize buttons) which I guess is controled by KDE/xwindows. I can then carry on using the application I was using but of course can no longer resize, move, minimize the window. I can quit the application using the pull down menu. If I do, I can then close other windows/ applications that were open in the background. The application that were running but whose windows were minimized are of course no longer accessible. Once I close everything, I am left with a clear background with absolutely nothing on it. There is no key stroke that I found that could bring up any dialog box or at least allow me to shut down properly. crt+alt+dek doesn't help either. At that point the only solution is to make a hard shut down. On startup the kernel of course complains that devices were not properly unmounted. I get a series of messages saying things like: i-blocks is 64, should be 8. FIXED. So I guess it's a problem with the windows environement. I thought linux was more stable than windows. I now have three questions: 1- how do I manage to shut down properly, should that happen again? 2- what can I do to help diagnostic what is the source of the problem? 3- and of course, how can I fix the problem? It happened several times already and each time I was running KMail and Netscape at least. (only that plus a small game last time it happened). I guess netscape could be involved in the problem (I didn't open it so that I could write this email). It was already pretty shitty under windows, made it crashed. I thought such a thing couldn't happen under Linux. Still, I may be wrong about netscape because the funny thing is that I could carry on using it after the desktop crashed. What do I do now? Is someone able to help me?
