I am using a mixed system of Debian etch/sarge. With kernel 2.6.16-2-686 from the official repository, I am getting some strange errors. The system will work fine for a while, and then (I think it's happening when a bunch of things are open simultaneously, kde with amarok, firefox, thunderbird, gnumeric, azureus...) for some reason almost everything stops working and I hear a "beep" from the speakers whenever I try to open anything new (the already open programs seem to continue working alright). In a terminal in kde, I get a segmentation fault from most things I try: ls, emacs, uptime, firefox, sudo, reboot, cat...etc..., however 'cd' seems to work fine. Now if I log out of KDE and use the terminal, cd is still the only thing which actually works, if I try one of the offending programs (cat for example), I get a screen full of messages which look like
I can temporarily 'fix' this by restarting (by the reset button on the case)....until it starts again. The system is a Pentium 4 with 1GB of ram and a swap partition which is barely used, so I don't think it's running out of memory. Other kernels (2.6.16-2-486 (used to work), 2.4.27) don't boot at all anymore (kernel panic).

There are some other strange things going on too, recently VLC was removed during an upgrade and refuses to reinstall as it now has a broken dependency. I have NO idea what's going on with this thing, any ideas would be a huge help.... (I'm not even sure which log files are relevant, maybe we could start there?)

Thanks for any help,

Not a Debian user so I don't know if they handle it any better but as a rule, if you mix releases you're going to have problems. We need to see what those various messages are but if it's working at the start then it sounds like you have an interesting problem. FYI cd will still be working while others won't because cd is a shell built-in, it's part of your shell and not an executable anywhere.

You say it's happening when you're running a few things at once, 1GB is a decent amount of memory but maybe you could try installing conky or use SuperKaramba to monitor your memory usage. If you've got a leak somewhere and are running out of memory and swap the kernel could accidentally be scrapping important pages making your system unusable.

I'm just guessing so far, if you check your logs after a reboot and find some helpful information (if it's a lot, use a pastebin) and post it we'll be able to take a better crack

I would download Memtest86 then burn the boot CD, make boot floppy and let it boot from either of these running the full test for at least 2 or 3 passes maybe even overnight.

cs-cam: Which logs should I check? I'm not sure which are relevant.

HappyTux: Can I just select Memtest86 from the grub menu and run it that way? It's already in the list...

If it's there, have a go at it. In case it doesn't work you can always d/l a bootfloppy with memtest Did you try booting a Live CD like Knoppix or Ubuntu? If you do, do the same problems arise?

I think the problem might have been mismatched memory... I had two (different brands) 512M sticks in 'channel A' of my mobo and none in "channel B". Right now I have just moved one of them over so I have one in each channel, and as of yet I haven't had anything funny happen. It's kind of strange though, that I'd never noticed anything wrong before now; they've both been in there for about 3 months. Any fishy business and I'll do a real memory test, but I just haven't had the time yet.

Try the memtest86 as suggested. If the memory is not the problem, then it's probably some other hardware issue.

I would not use mixed stable/testing system because stable wouldn't get used that much anyways and can cause broken dependencies and other unnecessary complexity. It's of course your call, not mine