Abstract
It has been known for a long time that white dwarfs are pulsationally unstable if nuclear burning takes place in their envelopes. Perturbation of energy generation rate promotes pulsational instability and this effect is frequently referred to as ε-mechanism. In recent years, with the advent of high-speed photometry, many rapidly varying white dwarfs have been discovered. However, periods of variability were found to be significantly longer than the periods of radial pulsations which were the only type of oscillations considered before the discovery. Furthermore, the case of ε-mechanism as being responsible for the observed variability has never been made strong for any of the observed objects.Variable white dwarfs are found among: Iosingle DA-type objects in the effective temperature range 10000-15000K; 2omembers of close, usually but not always, cataclysmic binary systems. Although, following an early suggestion by Warner and Robinson (1972), the excitation of nonradial oscillation is postulated in both cases, the two types represent very different physical situations and they will be discussed here separately.
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