I installed quake 3 arena in redhat 9 and it seems to rin fine for a while then it shuts itsled down and give me the following error :
Received signal 11, exiting...
Shutdown tty console.
Also after this happens the sound craps out.
Anyone have any ideas whats wrong?

what happens before that message shows?

The only thing I've notice is that my character model becomes quite disfigured and after awhile the games just quits and I get the error message.

i get the very same error, except the textures are all screwed up in-game.

P.S.
I am also running redhat 9 shrike with the 1.32b quake3 version

hmm , texture description reminds me off result when i had mixed up opengl libs on my system. Check you have the right libs , ie i have an nvidia card and use the nvidia
driver and opengl libs.

Mind you I have also found that sometimes a "bad" addon either map or model can cause
all sorts of graphics problems as well, just happened yesterday when i was
having a look at bid for power - the addon map pack "screwed" up the weapon effects models and some other textures in the games
mind you quake3 still has some annoying bugs which still have not been fixed ie
it seems impossible to browse a large number of models - the end result is low memory error
the enhanced ui available somewhere fixed this but is of little help with mods
that themselves customise the interface, i guess i will have to use a script and
3rd person view to select models in game again , its just a hastle to make
cheers