A perfectly working FC2 2.6.9 now Oops'es?
 

I have been running Fedora Core 2 on my AMD Athlon XP 2400+ for many months now with no problem. One day, I noticed the pecuilar problem of gaim not making sounds when it should have been. I tried closing it, but it wouldnt go away (the program continued to function normally though). kill -9 or killall had no effect. Then firefox started freezing up. Then mplayer...

I checked /var/log/messages, and I've found "Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference" with eax zero and nonzero in the many cases it's appeared, and also "Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address....". Both errors will occur in arbitrary processes.

I also run sshd, but I run strong passwords and have no known breakins. I've checked logs and histories, ran Rookit Hunter... so I dont think that's the cause.

Tried upgrading to 2.6.10-1.12_FC2, but still no help. Looking to remove the possibilty of hardware failure, I ran memtest86 on my box for nearly 24 hours with not a single error.

I'm pretty stuck here. I would really appreciate if anyone could shed some light on what could be causing a perfectly functioning system to start throwing around oopses? :Pengy: :scratch:

Does your sound work at all? I'm trying to think of something non-hardware related that could cause this and so far I'm stumped. I've seen plenty of kernel opps'es in my time... but 99.9% of them were totally my fault. The other .1% were hardware errors.

Thanks for the reply jtshaw.

The sound works, as in xmms works, but gaim will stop playing sounds if people sign on/off, etc. In the instance where mplayer was the process that caused an oops, no sound whatsoever would work, and if I tried restarting mplayer, it would give me a message "Couldn't open port 39' or something, and hang. Couldnt find anything useful on port 39 though.

Oh, on the sound hardware fault theory: gaim, xmms and mplayer all have audio in common, but Firefox does not, and that was on of the apps that froze up on me, so there goes that idea... :confused: