[ltp] Nedit crashes intermittently on a T40 with RH9 and FC1

[Greg Kuperberg]

I have a Thinkpad T40 running Fedora Core 1, "out of the box" except
for a very few extra RPMs.  I have had trouble with nedit, both with FC1
and even more with Red Hat 9 that it replaced.  Every once in a while,
nedit crashes with a segmentation fault and leaves ghost windows, even
though the process disappears.  In RH9, the X environment was invariably
unstable after this and the system had to be rebooted.  In FC1, I can
make the ghost windows go away just by logging out.  Usually the ghost
windows are then gone; but occassionally X crashes at this time and I have
to reboot.  If I kill X from a text window when this condition arises,
the whole system crashes.  I cannot connect the crashes with any specific
editing action or event.  They happen randomly after using Nedit anywhere
from a minute to a few hours.  Sometimes they seem to come in runs.

Another side to the story is that you cannot use Nedit with the notorious
OpenMotif 2.2 library that comes with Red Hat 9.  Instead you should
use the rpm file distributed by the nedit web site.  I don't remember
whether FC1 uses a better OpenMotif or a better nedit rpm file.  What I
do remember is that the openmotif issue is independent of the weird
crash-with-ghost-window problem that I see.

This bug is poorly attested and seems to fall between Nedit,
Redhat/Fedora, X, and the X drivers for specific graphics cards.  So any
of four different development teams could take responsibility for it,
or not.  The Nedit team hasn't seen it.  Has anyone on this mailing
list seen, or can anyone here reproduce, this Nedit crash?  If so,
is it limited to the T40, and is it still there in Fedora Core 2?

-- 
  /\  Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis)
 /  \
 \  / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/
  \/  * All the math that's fit to e-print *