[CentOS] General CentOS 5.1 (or Gnome) instability?

[William L. Maltby]

On Wed, 2008-06-04 at 16:14 -0400, Alfred von Campe wrote:
> <snip>

> I would suspect the hardware or some configuration issues.  But these  
> issues started cropping up after I upgraded our existing systems to  
> CentOS 5.1.  The "upgrade" was a complete reinstall via a kickstart  
> script (I reformatted all partitions/LVs except for one), and all  
> systems are configured identically.  BTW, I'm using CentOS for our  
> desktops as well as our servers, and all these problems are really  
> confined to the desktop systems.  Almost everyone uses the default  
> Gnome desktop.
> 
> So, does anyone else have the perception that CentOS 5.X  
> (particularly Gnome) is a little less stable than CentOS 4.X or is it  
> just me?

I've been running 5.1 for a long time, NP except the Firefox. I'm using
the 3.0rc1 now and all but the Java applets work fine with it. It is
more stable.

As to your specific problem, since hardware is not common among the
users reporting problems, I suspect that the only commonality is the
configuration *beginning* with the automated install. My thought is
there is some flaw in it that becomes common to (almost?) all the
installations.

It might be instructive to do one real manual install (that matches as
closely as possible the automated results) on a representative system
and an automated one. Then map the differences.

Just as general notes from astutely watching this list, I guess mixed
32/64 bit libs could be an issue. Components from mixed repositories?
All yum updated (been several things fixed since original 5.1 - I don't
know if they are related).

Have you examined the logs for any machines that seem consistently
problematic?

That's all that comes to mind ATM.

> 
> Alfred
> 
> <snip sig stuff>

HTH
-- 
Bill