Also another question, Linux occasionally crashes on me, I've switched to the LTS kernel to see if that prevents it. Where can I find news on Linux development and how often new LTS kernels come out?
lwn.net is the best resource if you can't read lkml, which is usually very technical.
A more stable (i.e. older) kernel may or may not help with any crashes. If there is a clear kernel panic (it switches to a black screen with white text and tells you it's a kernel panic), it might. A more frequent cause of crashing is graphics drivers: nouveau, the free NVIDIA driver, is notoriously buggy. These will manifest by a sudden and complete "freeze", where the last frame is displayed on screen but the system is otherwise unresponsive.
If you have an NVIDIA card, switching to NVIDIA's proprietary driver will probably be much more stable, at the cost of software freedom.
Actually, I'm using AMD's open source drivers. So far I haven't had any crashes, so I think switching kernels solved my problem. Thanks for the resource!
If you just want to know what the latest stable, mainline, etc. kernels are, rather than news articles, the frontpage of https://www.kernel.org/ has everything. Your distribution might also maintain multiple versions of the kernel.
The journal is a log of every kernel level event in your system, loading and unloading hardware, modules, logging sucessful display manager starts etc. You can can check it with journalctl. I should note this is for if you use systemd as your startup system, which you may or may not be. What distro do you use? Whatever start up system you use should have a logging function you can probe.
Also another question, Linux occasionally crashes on me, I've switched to the LTS kernel to see if that prevents it. Where can I find news on Linux development and how often new LTS kernels come out?
lwn.net is the best resource if you can't read lkml, which is usually very technical.
A more stable (i.e. older) kernel may or may not help with any crashes. If there is a clear kernel panic (it switches to a black screen with white text and tells you it's a kernel panic), it might. A more frequent cause of crashing is graphics drivers: nouveau, the free NVIDIA driver, is notoriously buggy. These will manifest by a sudden and complete "freeze", where the last frame is displayed on screen but the system is otherwise unresponsive.
If you have an NVIDIA card, switching to NVIDIA's proprietary driver will probably be much more stable, at the cost of software freedom.
Actually, I'm using AMD's open source drivers. So far I haven't had any crashes, so I think switching kernels solved my problem. Thanks for the resource!
If you just want to know what the latest stable, mainline, etc. kernels are, rather than news articles, the frontpage of https://www.kernel.org/ has everything. Your distribution might also maintain multiple versions of the kernel.
For your crash, check your journal, it should offer clues as to why the crash is happening.
Thank you, what is the journal and how do i check it?
The journal is a log of every kernel level event in your system, loading and unloading hardware, modules, logging sucessful display manager starts etc. You can can check it with
journalctl. I should note this is for if you use systemd as your startup system, which you may or may not be. What distro do you use? Whatever start up system you use should have a logging function you can probe.Also make sure that this is persisted (kept) between boots; this is configured in
/etc/systemd/journald.confjournalctl -kshows only kernel events.Also clean it up every once and a while, thing gets big over a year.
Thanks!