I'm having a problem with the Linux client and it's a show-stopper....I hadn't played this game since it went gold, so I finally decided to give it a shot. But I'm getting major instability. Sometimes the game unceremoniously dumps to my window manager and brings up the bug report window, other times it freezes and must be killed. And a few times I've actually seen a kernel panic (flashing keyboard status lights). This happens a LOT. I tried disabling just about every graphical extra in config.ini. After doing this, and after the last client update, I played for quite some time last night and all seemed well, then finally I got another client freeze. After that I got so many crashes I had to try three times to get all the way through an escort mission.

Looking at my syslog, the most recent crash seems to have been precipitated by this error:

"Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000004"

I'm no kernel programmer, but shouldn't this never happen? Looking through the rest of syslog, it appears this is the error every time.

Here's the error dump in its entirety:
http://theplaceofcoolness.com/vendetta_error.txt

The system is an Athlon 2500+ (yeah I know, time to build a new box) with 512 RAM, 256 VRAM on an Nvidia FX5950 (AGP8x), and no overclocking. OS is a mostly stock Slackware 9.1 build (Linux 2.4.22). I don't have any other stability issues aside from an occasional overheat on two specific graphic-intensive apps, which always results in a power-off until the machine cools sufficiently. Also my Vendetta issue is completely random. Sometimes it happens right after I start the game and continues to crash randomly, other times it takes a while, other times it will crash once then run fine for a long time.

Any help would be appreciated. I rather like this game and had pretty much decided to pay for at least a 3 month period or so, but this instability thing is a deal-breaker. :(

This sounds a lot like a graphics driver bug. What version of the nvidia drivers are you using?

I was using drivers from October of last year.....just tried the latest (100.14.19) from Nvidia's site, still no joy. I just loaded up Vendetta and did manage to finish a fairly short escort mission, then the game crashed as I was entering the station.

FWIW I haven't seen any kernel panics or irrecoverable system hangs since the last Vendetta update, just lots of crashes still. Also sometimes the game doesn't want to run after crashing, until I reboot.

Can we see the errors.log and openglerr.log files?

Here ya go:
http://theplaceofcoolness.com/openglerr.log

http://theplaceofcoolness.com/errors.log
(deleted unnecessary chat messages)

OK hold everything, looks like it's fixed......

The solution? Changed window managers. *shrug* I've used Icewm for ages...on a hunch I tried fluxbox instead, and was able to play for around 2 hours solid with no crashes. Go figure!

Sorry to bother the board with this one but it really had me stumped.

Well, check that.....it's BETTER, but still crashing. Tonight it was particularly bad. I played for around 2 hours and the game crashed during gameplay about 4 or 5 times. Additionally, after the game crashed, it would rarely run without a reboot of the machine. I'd get dumped back to the console, or see a segfault, or the "send report to Guild" thing would come up.......

Any ideas? I'm about to call it quits.

I don't think there are a lot of people who still use 2.4 for gaming so you may be running into issues that others don't.

tried alsa instead of oss? it's a shot in the dark but who knows.

maybe play with aa and shaders disabled for a while to see if it gets better.

I think you need to update your linux. You're the only one reporting Linux crashes with this version. There may be an incompatibility between the nvidia drivers and the kernel. Hwoever, we'll keep looking for the problem on VO's side using your crash reports.

Ya I hate to keep spamming you guys with crash reports....actually most of the time the crash report window doesn't come up.

I see in config.ini I'm set to use OSS...what's the proper syntax to specify ALSA? I did disable shaders and some other stuff, also no AA.

I guess I should update my OS, though I really hate to go through all the hassle just for one app. I thought about bad RAM....I do have some new RAM coming (going from 512 to 1g), would be nice if that fixed it. Strangely, I was able to play for like 4+ hours straight yesterday and not a single problem.

Anyway, thanks for the help.