Bug 6988

I have a generic pentium PC with 32 megs of ram and 1.8 gig hard drive.
clock is 90 mhz.  I have installed Red Hat 6.1 and all errata RPM updates I
could find on the Red hat site.  I have run the current session for about 9
hours.  I use the GNOME gui and today I had 2 terminal windows open.  The
first was for command line operation, the second was to run the "top"
function of linux, allowing me to monitor the system.

The "top" terminal window came to a halt when I was entering shift P or
shift m or shift T.  I just closed the window, and noticed on another
portion of the GNOME screen, that an error box appeared.  "your terminal
window has crashed.... " and there was another message I do not recall.

The failure was not serious.  I could open ppp from the other window, and
start netscape and log on to the internet.

I don't know even if it was a bug.  Maybe a normal error handling routine
kicked in when an error occurred in the 2nd terminal window routine.


I wonder if Linux works like the old IBM 360 SYSTEM. When a program would
fail, the system would take a snapshot of the core memory, and a program
would "dump" it to the line printer.  System programmers or Application
programmers could examine the hexadecimal code and pinpoint a failed
instruction, and make the necessary connection.

John F. Kohler
217 Fairlawn Avenue
Daly City, CA
94105