Pidgin starts normally and shows buddy list and buddy activity (sign on/off) but crashes as soon as you press enter after typing a line of text. How reproducible: every time Steps to Reproduce: 1. start pidgin 2. click on buddy 3. type text 4. press enter 5. crash IBM thinkpad 600e with 196M RAM ... worked fine under F4 - F7, crashes under F8. May be related to faulty sound card driver installation see #396101.
Please get backtrace as described on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/StackTraces Also please tell us what version of Pidgin you are using, and what pidgin or libpurple plugins you have loaded.
*** * * DEBUG * *** [Detaching after fork from child process 3164.] W: shm.c: Failed to remove SHM segment /pulse-shm-4207174959: No such file or directory [Detaching after fork from child process 3165.] [New Thread -1283458160 (LWP 3166)] [New Thread -1293948016 (LWP 3167)] *** PULSEAUDIO: Unable to create stream. *** PULSEAUDIO: Unable to create stream. [Detaching after fork from child process 3169.] [Detaching after fork from child process 3170.] [Detaching after fork from child process 3171.] [Detaching after fork from child process 3172.] [Detaching after fork from child process 3173.] [Detaching after fork from child process 3174.] [Detaching after fork from child process 3175.] [Detaching after fork from child process 3176.] pidgin: pcm_pulse.c:115: pulse_stop: Assertion `pcm->stream' failed. Program received signal SIGABRT, Aborted. [Switching to Thread -1208973088 (LWP 3136)] 0x00110402 in __kernel_vsyscall () I muted the sound and it works fine
This looks like it is crashing in pulseaudio, they will likely need a backtrace with pulseaudio-debuginfo installed to be able to help.
This has been fixed a while back in the alsa plugin.