[KLUG Members] RH 8 - GUI Problem

[Adam Williams]

>>when I looked at logs:
>>I found the following messages:
>>localhost kernel: out of memory. killed process 11482 (gnome-terminal)>[snipped the rest of the errors].
>Upon bootup run:  free -m
>Do you see any space listed for a swap?  Ie:
>             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
>Mem:           124        119          4          0          4         53
>-/+ buffers/cache:         62         61
>Swap:          127         13        113
>If you have no swap, and you consume your total physical memory, you'll
>likely see such things happen.

You should have swap, but it is possible to run out of memory even with
swap space available and free.  Some operations require physical RAM,
and if the kernel can't make some available fast enough - boom.  Thats
why it never lets "free" drop to zero.  But the last of hard disk
activity and the nasty VM message make me think he has a rather nasty
goblin living amongst the pipes.

Have you adjusted any sysctl parameters?"

When you attempt to run an app (from the command line) do you ever see a
message like -
"error: trying to vfree() nonexistent vm area
 segmentation fault (core dumped)"
?

What does "uname -a" say?  I've got a hunch it says 2.4.18-11