Unstable Fedora Installation

[Bruce Feist]

I've installed the AMD 64-bit version of Fedora, 2.6.13, on a new 
computer with 1 gig of RAM, one PCI-connected IDE drive, and three SATA 
disks.  My most recent experience with Linux was RH 8.1 or so.  Bad 
things are happening...

1)  The computer locks up frequently.  It usually happens while I'm 
executing rsync or rcp... which isn't surprising, since those are the 
two main programs I'm running at the moment.  I'm trying to grab data 
from the drives of my old RH 8.1 system -- it was hacked, and I don't 
trust it, so I'm taking only data files from it.

2)  After the last lockup, I turned the computer off and restarted.  All 
seemed well until Gnome came up -- Nautilus crashed repeatedly.  I was 
able to bring up three terminal windows, but now I cannot start up other 
applications such as Thunderbird.  'top' reports that I'm using almost 
all of the memory installed, although I'm barely touching the swap file; 
I wonder if that has something to do with it.

3)  I'm now getting various "Oops" messages from Fedora in my terminal 
window as I rsync.  A typical sequence is something like:

Message from syslogd at janus at Sun Oct 23 13:05:06 2005 ...
janus kernel: Oops: 0000 [1]
Message from syslogd at janus at Sun Oct 23 13:05:07 2005 ...
janus kernel: CR2: ffff81ff2b6df30c

There are several areas that I'm concerned about.  First, is 64-bit 
Fedora as stable as 32-bit?  Second, I'm using SELinux... is that 
messing me up somehow?  Third, I'm using virtual volumes to combine the 
SATA drives; is that unstable or error-prone?  Fourth: My hardware is 
new, and could conceivably have problems.  Fifth: There are two network 
cards installed.  One, which will be used to connect to the Internet via 
a DSL router, is currently not used; the other is used to connect to my 
home network, including the older RH machine.  Could the missing network 
connection somehow be upsetting things?  (I wouldn't think so!)

I'd appreciate any suggestions.  I'm getting nowhere solving this.

Bruce Feist