Segmentation Fault (What is that?)
 

Quite a few things are giving me a "segmentation fault" error message. What does that mean?

Most notably, when I am in the console and I type "xawtv" to load the TV player software that was bundled with Fedora, it shows it for a brief second then returns with the message "segmentation fault".

How do I fix that?

Hi,

What it means is that the application you are trying to use has performed an illegal action (generally in regards to memory). It is kind of the same as a Windows' GPF, although in Windows (especially for 9x/Me versions...) it is because of a not so good kernel.

So, there is not much you can do exept trying to get a patch for that application. Please note that maybe it is caused by a RPM package used by some of your applications.

Hi,

I tried the application you just mentioned and I got the same error...

********
This is xawtv-3.88, running on Linux/i686 (2.4.22-1.2115.nptl)
Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-ledfixed-medium-r-*--39-*-*-*-c-*-*-*" to type FontStruct
Segmentation fault

********

As you can see the application could not convert a particular string and stopped!

Not much you can do except report it. Maybe someone else found what is the cause for this segmentation fault... It could be related to a media rpm package of some sort or could be the application itself.

You might have success if you recompile it yourself.
I have downloaded at least one binary that seg-faulted on my system, but the program worked fine when I compiled it myself.

In this case, a bug-report should definitely be submitted, as you really should be able to run the binaries bundled with the system.

Answered in this post:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/77751

Did the test myself, xawtv w/o argument will seg fault, but with -device /dev/video0 option works.

Good!

I'm also running Fedora 1. xawtv worked fine (no arguments) when my machine was running rh8, now it's crashing. I'm not having any luck with either the -noxv tag (no window ever opens), nor with the device tag (still get a segmentation fault)... I'm wondering if anyone else is also experiencing trouble with this, or do the above options fix most peoples problems?