Segmentation fault
 

The problem started today. It seems that a variety of programs crash, uttering nothing more than "Segmentation fault" when they die prematurly (usually before opening a window). Konsole opens a window, but input is locked, and after some fruitles clicking and typing, it crashes. Konqueror worked the first couple time I ran it today, but now it dies before even opening a window. Mozilla works, but sometimes when a new window get opened (popup, ect) Mozilla will die. Gaim seems to run fine, but sometimes when a chatbox is opened, it will crash. Now, I did a few searches, and in this post [which I apparently can't tell you about] wwwDOTlinuxquestionsDOTorgSLASHquestionsSLASHshowthreadDOTphp?threadid=3238
the dude says
"When a program gets a 'Segmentaion fault' it usually means there is a serious programatic error. Programs encounter segmentation faults if they try to access resources that are not allocated to it. Since linuxconf is somewhat stable, the problem was likely caused by an error that it never expected, possibly an oddity in your machines configuration."
Now, anyone know what I did that would cause a whole bunch of programs to start doing this? I can't think of anything I did recently (the problem did just start today, after a month of good running) that would have started this problem. However, I have been looking around at my system, because apparently I don't have ALSA drivers for my sound card, but I didn't change anything. I also installed some cursors, but surely that wouldn't effect anything, would it?

Anyways, if anyone could point me in the right direction, or give me some idea on how to debug it myself, it would be appreciated.

What crabboy said is still valid, and if you
didn't change anything crucial (new version
of glibc, manually modified the kernels memory
routines) you shouldn't be getting segfaults.

However, there's always the possibility of
"flakey hardware" ... your memory-chips or
the controller may be in the process of going
ta-ta... did you, by any chance, modify your
BIOS settings to improve performance? You
could try more conservative BIOS settings.

Cheers,
Tink

Hmmm
 

Awsome, thanks. About a month or so ago, before I installed Linux, I transplanted some part of another(much older) computer into this one (CD-ROM, 7GB HD, PCI NIC, 128MB RAM chip), and if the memory chip may be going bad, it would be that old one. I'll try taking out the old memory chip, and if that doen't work I can try to remember what critical software I installed recently.

Thanks a bunch!

YAY! I figured it out!
 

Well, I did a little more research, and in this post here:
linuxquestionsDOTorgSLASHquestionsSLASHhistorySLASH83672
floyd documents a problem VERY similar to mine. he figured out that programs that run as root don't crash.

Now, I was playing around a little bit, running programs as root, and I noticed something: programs that run as root use the default mouse cursors, whereas normally running programs use the cursors that I had rently installed (cursors are specific to the user, as defined in /home/~USER/.icons/.icons/default/ ; so I put two and two together, came up with 5, uninstalled my cursors (deleted /home/~USER/.icons/.icons/default/index.theme), and rebooted. She WORKS! It was the dag-blasted cursors that were causing the segfaults. I still don't know why, or how. I do know that I updated kdelibs (3.1-58.2mdk) through Mandrake update a while before I installed cursors, so maybe something is up with that. I don't know, but anyways, it works.

So, if anyone (floyd) has a similar problem, try uninstalling your cursors (rename /home/~USER/.icons/.icons/default/index.theme to index.theme.backup, or something) and see if that clears stuff up.

The next step is to figure out how to get my tuxcursors working again...

Almost forgot, thanks to Tinkster, everybody who posted on floyd's post, and floyd himself.