I have five Unix devices in my house: two Macs, a Linux box, a ReplayTV and an N800.

Only one of the five crashes ever. But that one crashes, so that it needs to be reset by having the battery taken out of it, about every two days.

Have a guess which one it is.

Why is this? I can only think of two explanations: 1. There is no MMU in the N800; or 2. Poor kernel-mode drivers.

Can anyone speak to why this thing locks up *ever*?

I work with a multitude of linux boxes and never have had one crashed, why the IT's do just reflects poor coding on Nokia's behalf.

There are two reasons why things "crash" on the Internet Tablets:

1. A bug causes a segmentation fault and the app quits - the same software running on a desktop Linux system will have this problem.
2. The device's constraints are lower than that of a desktop system. This means the Linux kernel's OOM (Out-Of-Memory) killer may be invoked more often.

If one of the core framework services crashes, the lifeguard may cause the entire device to reboot. Bugs in maemo-af-desktop/hildon-desktop or any of the code running within it (status bar and home applets) will cause this effect.

Lock-ups which require the battery to be removed, I've never seen.

HTH,

Andrew

It's unfortunate that it can crash, but to compare this device to a full-blown PC in this regard is disingenuous.

I don't see why. I can understand perhaps needing to reboot if out of memory (although I'd say it should kill an application first).

But a Linux box ought to be a Linux box, and ought not to crash. Mine often doesn't reboot; it just locks up, unusuable. This has to be either a bad driver, or a core service locking up. Either way, Nokia needs to fix certain bad code, and this thing can stay up like my Linux desktop.

1. Applications can crash, that doesn't crash the operating system.
2. The UI can in principle hang, that doesn't crash the operating system. But depending on how the power button is handled (that is, what part of the system handles it? Is it the UI or some other app?) this will in practice require a reboot, and may even need a battery removal -- re. the power button handling.
3. The OS kernel may crash with a kernel panic.
4. The system may run out of memory because of a memory leak, or other memory overload. This doesn't crash the OS, but applications may shut down.
5. The kernel watchdog (which is enabled but could in principle be disabled) may detect a situation where it deliberately decides to reboot the system, a known one is when it detects that the DSP doesn't respond.

I have seen 5 and 1 myself. Never heard about 3. There has been speculations about 4.

Now, my PalmOS PDA will occasionally have "fatal resets", this is where an application does something really bad and the whole system goes up in flames. You have to press the stylus into the reset hole to recover. This simply doesn't happen on N800/770 and similar systems. That been said, my Sharp Zaurus w/linux is more stable than the N800 w/linux, as the Zaurus doesn't have any watchdog reboots or actually any failures at all. There's no reason the N800 won't get to approach that level of stability, given a bit more time (looking forward to the next OS upgrade! ) And certainly I've never experienced what occasionally happens on PalmOS: White screen of death, this isn't a hardware error like on the 770, but instead a full loss of installation, it starts from scratch and you lose it all. This usually happens when you forgot to make a backup, so that you lose the maximum amount of newly stored information. And this is why backup programs that automatically schedule backups during the night are so popular with PDAs. I feel much more relaxed with my N800, even with the occasional watchdog reboot!

The N800 and 770 can't possibly have the resources or be as robust as full-fledged Macs or PCs. The architecture is also newer.

That said, I'm all for the causes of all crashes being researched and corrected.

Yesterday I replaced the graphics card in my desktop computer and installed a new driver, and since then I've had to reboot the system about 8 times.. before that I had an uptime of 77 days (since the last power break). Stability one takes for granted can change fast.. even on desktop systems.

Understood, TA-t3. It's all relative.

Anybody thought about having hardware failure? Then it would not matter what OS or how stable software it is... and it still crashes. In PC world most common HW failures causing crashes have been memory sticks and power supply issues. Why couldn't this be the case with N800 as well? It is not out of question having a bad solder joint, for example, that makes sometimes no contact, and would cause hangup or crash/reboot.

I have N800 and I have found it to be very reliable so far. If you are experiencing frequent crashes I'd suspect actual hardware being faulty?