[KLUG Members] New member intro

[Bruce Smith]

> I just signed up on the maillist today and thought I would send a quick into.

Welcome aboard!  

If you live in the area, hopefully you can attend meetings too.

> My system has recently been upgraded from a dual-boot Red Hat 6.2/Windows 98
> to a SuSE 7.2 linux only OS.  I got tired of viruses and the built in
> vulnerability of Outlook.

I hear you there!   :-)

> SuSE 7.2 claims to be newbie friendly and you can get by with GUI only, at
> least until something goes wrong.  I decided that if I am going to go linux
> only, I need to dive into Unix and linux configuration.  Thats why I'm here.

Very good idea.

> I run an overgrown homepage which is a popular sailing website, the Guide to
> Sailing and Cruising Stories.  Mainly I look for free info for people wanting
> to take tours on their sailboats.  So I do a lot of web surfing and searches.
>  Typical method of operation is to open about five or six browsers (or more)
> and keep moving from browser to browser as I surf along.  I like to keep my
> modem busy transfering info.  I am using the Konqueror browser provided by
> SuSE 7.2.

Konqueror is very nice.  I've also heard nice things about Galeon and Opera.

> My question today is about why my PC locks up when I have multiple  browsers
> running.  I am assuming that it is because I have only 64M RAM.  If I upgrade
> to 256M do you think that I will have better luck with multiple browsers?
> Are there any other reasons why the screen would lock up with multiple
> browsers, such as large incoming files, javascript or java problems?

Define "locks up".  The whole computer or just X-windows?

What happens if you do a CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE or CTRL-ALT-F1 when it's locked?

How much swap space do you have?  (type "free" at a command prompt)

What window manager are you using?  Some of those are memory hogs too.

Memory is cheap, and I'd recommend upgrading if you do a lot of browsing.
Worst case is it'll be slow due to excessive swapping (assuming you have 
a swap partition allocated).

--------------------------------------------
Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
http://www.armstrong-intl.com/
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