Re: What causes a segmentations fault?

[Richard Cobbe <cobbe@airmail.net>]

Lo, on Friday, December 28, Brandon N did write:

> My box recently locked up twice, I believe due to static shock.  
> 
> Now when I start gnome it says gnome-panel could not start due to
> segmentation fault.  A couple of other applications also got
> segmentations faults.  
> 
> Is this likely due to a hardware problem (memory) or did something get
> corrupted due to the two hard reboots (library perhaps).

Well, if you didn't change anything else, it could theoretically be
either.  Another poster mentioned a couple of Debian utils to test
memory; the quick-and-dirty way is to recompile (though not necessarily
install) your kernel.  (Gcc creates a lot of very large, complicated
data structures and traverses them repeatedly, so it's very sensitive to
memory errors.)

> Is there a way to compare an installed package with the package
> contents to see if something does not match what was installed from
> the package?

In general, yes, although (as of potato) not all packages provide the
necessary data.  Check out /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.md5sums.

Richard