[Sderby] suse 8.2 crashing

[David Jolley]

L Wright wrote:

> Thanks for the advice Paul. I had already re-installed in case the 
> original was bad. I have dowloaded the updates (although I couldn't 
> see one for athlon). The situation now is that I can use Konquerer and 
> can open Yast2. If I try to open OpenOffice I get a window for ooop 
> wrapper then the system hangs. If I try to update OpenOffice the 
> system hangs. This is the case with other software such as Gimp. Shell 
> windows also crash the machine as does trying to log off. Is there a 
> way I can systematically troubleshoot what is going on such as system 
> logs/ calls etc?
> Leigh
>
If this is happening with "standard" software like XTerms (I'm assuming 
xterms, although if you're using KDE, chances are they're K shell 
windows), I'd think it fairly likely that glibc hadn't installed 
correctly after an update, or at least *some* library hadn't updated 
itself correctly, most likely one of Qt or Gtk (Gimp uses Gtk, KDE apps 
use Qt).  But if this was the case, I'd expect a lot more than what 
you've listed to be going wrong.
This is a real long shot, but can you run ldconfig (as root) to see if 
that cures the problems - this will re-populate the linker cache, and 
tell it where all the libraries are.
That might in itself throw up a few errors, you could do worse than 
fixing any that appear.

To see how far a program goes through it's run, and what file 
descriptors it opens, you can run the program under a little utility 
called strace (basically strace <program-name> ), which intercepts the 
library calls and shows you what's happening in the program.  This very 
rarely outputs less than 10 pages of information though, so is the last 
resort option (practically speaking) although the last 4 or 5 lines of 
the output might yield something, who knows :)

As for system logs, Suse seems to make a lot of use of /var/log/messages 
- everything seems to be logged into it; although this is usually used 
for system services (daemons) which don't have a terminal to output 
their errors to, IYSWIM - so might not actually show anything useful.  
On my Suse system, I can't find where the dynamic linker error messages 
(if there are any) are configured to go to.

Hope this helps

Cheers

Dave.