Every time I startup my KDE 3.5.1 desktop, I get signal 11 (sigsegv) faults. I honestly don’t even know where to start to fix this error. Does anybody know how to fix this?
The error messages:
The application KNotify (knotify) crashed and caused the signal 11 (SIGSEGV)
The application KDesktop (kdesktop) crashed and caused the signal 11 (SIGSEGV)
Sounds like nobody knows how to solve this one!! Well, can anyone steer me to the right place to find the answer? That would be greatly appreciated!!!
signal SIGSEGV is a segmentation fault. It usually happens when a program improperly handles memory thus terminating in an abnormal way. I would suggest that you check your memory using memtest86 as the memory itself can be the root of all this
Thanks for your help microchip8. Right after your post, I burned the memtest86 cd and booted from it. The diagnostic says my memory passed all tests. (test lasted about an hour). Any other suggestions? Time to do like I did back in the windowz days and just do a reinstall?
Hey there,
The memtest was a good step - always good to rule out hardware first. However if it were memory you would most likely also experience other system instability too, but it this case you get the same result every time you run the same app - most likely the app.
While I don’t have any magic bullet for you, I would play around with it a bit before going to the reinstall.
You can still use yast from within bash - just use the curses version! You don’t need no stink’en GUI!
You might just even consider removing and reinstalling the KDE packages, etc.
Heck - if you can stand to reinstall, I say try to fix it with progressively bigger hammers until you A) Break it irrevocably or B) Fix it.
If you want to really dig you you can look into using back traces to zero in on the exact point at which things fly off the rails, however binary you are running has to be compiled with debugging flags, and kdestop may or may not be. For a general orientation to this idea, see this site How to get meaningful backtraces in Gentoo — Gentoo Linux Documentation - although written for Gentoo the general principles are still broadly applicable.
Good hunting!
Pete
LewsTherinTelemon. I guess it’s time to roll my sleeves up and get into back traces. I’ve never done this before, but its always good to learn something new. I’ll be sure to keep you posted on my progress (or lack thereof).
Thanks. And if anyone else has anything else to add, I’m all ears!!!
I finally had the opportunity to try and dig into this problem using backtraces. Unfortunately, the backtrace is saying “This backtrace appears to be of no use. This is probably because your packages are built in a way which prevents creation of proper backtraces, or the stack frame was seriously corrupted in
the crash.” What now??