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Reported bugs through bugzilla, anything else I can do?

I'm actually a bit disappointed as a friend of mine is a network admin and he told me they have a linux server that has not been rebooted for a few years now, so why is mine crashing so often? I'm a big fun of Debian and Fedora, but Fedora latest release keeps annoying me. Is the only solution to switch to something more stable, like Debian Lenny or hopefully Fedora 11 or 12?

UPDATE:

here is the error message:

Dec  4 15:09:33 julia kernel: [drm:i915_hangcheck_elapsed] *ERROR* Hangcheck timer elapsed... GPU hung
Dec  4 15:09:33 julia kernel: [drm:i915_do_wait_request] *ERROR* i915_do_wait_request returns -5 (awaiting 230713 at 230710)

I'm still not convinced that the crashes are caused by faulty cdrom drive. Have added my vote on the launchpad bug issue hoping someone is going to fix it soon.

UPDATE2: Memory has been tested thoroughly and no errors were detected during the test

matcheek
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    The very first thing to check is your RAM. Run [Memtest86+](http://www.memtest.org/) overnight. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Dec 05 '10 at 22:39
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    @matcheek I do assume you mean you're having a kernel panic? have you looked for any error messages in `dmesg`? ++ ramtest – xenoterracide Dec 06 '10 at 01:05
  • I have to apologise to Fedora 13. My cd-rom drive is broken, so there's a broken hardware issue, but.. should a faulty cd-rom justify kernel crash? – matcheek Dec 06 '10 at 10:43
  • @matcheek justify? ... well maybe no... but it certainly could be the cause of your problem. any hardware problem (with perhaps the exception plug and play devices) can cause your kernel to crash. certainly the driver could possibly be more robust and prevent the crash... but you can't always rely on that. – xenoterracide Dec 06 '10 at 12:52
  • This is a really stupid question. Even if this was a fedora problem, how are we supposed to know what to do without any kind of information? Stop blaming the software first. You shouldn't expect any random installation to work perfectly because your friend has a server that's been up for a year because it's probably running a very finely tuned version of fedora on known good hardware. – Falmarri Dec 06 '10 at 20:33
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    @Falmarri Well, I read it more as "How do I debug random kernel crashes?", which is a good question – Michael Mrozek Dec 06 '10 at 20:34
  • I second @Gilles comment: Check your RAM. If you already did, *check it again*... – Josh Dec 07 '10 at 14:17
  • @Falmarri: look at xenoterracide first comment to see what a helpful comment looks like. This is how I found the error messages included in the question. Now, look at your comment and you can tell the difference. – matcheek Dec 07 '10 at 14:57
  • Would you kindly remove the 'debian' tag from your question, as it is not really about Debian (so is not useful to people who watch the 'debian' tag for questions)? Many thanks – jmtd Jan 24 '11 at 13:45

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A Linux crash is almost invariably caused by a hardware driver. I would start by looking at the graphics card driver. Find an alternative driver that can support your hardware (for instance, if you have an Nvidia graphics chipset, find out if you have the proprietary or open-source version of the driver installed and install the other one then see if the problem persists.

After you determine which driver is causing the problem, you should submit a bug report. Then you can make a decision to either switch to an alternative driver permanently, try to install the latest version of the same driver manually, or to wait for Fedora to update the driver in the repositories.

Shawn J. Goff
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