Regardless of the fact that the system is probably new, you might try
checking a few hardware issues.

Two that I'd suggest are the memory and memory config. I've had at least
one dual opteron system 'eat' memory (ie ecc memory errors on one of the
cpu memory banks). The replacement memory failed too, turns out it was a
bad cpu that was somehow frying the memory via the memory bus. AMD is
still investigating the failure. I'd guess that it's tied to the
integrated memory controller. The CPU finally failed after 3 months of
operation.

Anyways, try putting all the memory in one cpu's memory bank if it's a
Numa model (separate bank of memory per CPU) to disable the Numa
abilities.

Also, you might try memtest86 and see if one of the memory modules is
definitely bad. I've had more than a few memory modules test good and
finally fail after a month or two of running under a full load.

Just a few thoughts. If updating the software doesn't help, try the
hardware route.

Michael Joy
HEP - University of Mississippi
[log in to unmask]

On Thu, 2005-02-10 at 10:06 -0600, Miles O'Neal wrote:
> The other day I installed SL 3.0.2 onto a Penguin
> Altus 1000E dual Opteron system.  (We used 3.0.2
> only because we already have a 32 bit system using
> 3.0.2).
> 
> Everything went fine until I started X as root.
> When I was customizing the GUI (focus follows
> mouse, background, etc), one or two of the apps
> that handle preferences (I'm pretty sure the theme
> panel was the first one to do this) popped up a
> panel saying they had crashed.  No big deal, I
> was just poking around to see what was there
> (other than focus follows mouse).
> 
> But now when I type "startx", the GNOME desktop
> comes up, but nautilus gives me the crash popup,
> and the items that should be on the desktop
> aren't there.  I cleaned out all the .g* files
> and directories, .metacity. .nautilus, etc. and
> tried again.  Same results.
> 
> I've never seen this happen before - any ideas?
> I didn't see anything on the web that looked
> related, either.  If you have a link I couldn't
> find, that would be great.]
> 
> Thanks,
> Miles