[TriLUG] Debian Sarge is dying somehow

[Brian Henning]

Hi Y'all,
  In chasing the IE6.0 rabbit I mentioned earlier, I decided to go with the 
remote desktop approach.  rdesktop seemed to install and operate perfectly 
with no problems.  So I tried to create a desktop shortcut (er...  link to 
application) to a one-line shell script I wrote to call rdesktop with the 
appropriate flags and server address.  When I clicked the "Ok" button, 
things went, for lack of a better explanation, to heck.
  The dialog for creating the link never really disposed of itself.  It 
ceased to respond, and the entire system suddenly bogged down to a nearly 
100% unresponsive crawl (no mouse response, etc).  Couldn't even switch 
virtual terminals.
  I walked away for a bit and returned to a text screen chock full of 
out-of-memory -related error text (which had filled the entire scrollback 
buffer).
  On reboot, the system reaches "Starting system logging daemon: syslogd" 
and hangs.  There is some hard disk activity now and then, and eventually, 
if it is left to its own devices, it will again fill the buffer with 
out-of-memory messages.
  Before this machine was loaded with Linux, it was a 98 machine that had 
started to bluescreen uncontrollably.  I was hoping it was a software issue, 
but this is starting to make me think maybe it's hardware-related.  Does 
anyone have some input based on what I've just described?  Seen it before 
and know what is likely the cause, and/or how to fix it?

Thanks, everyone.
~Brian
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Brian A. Henning
Strutmasters.com
866.597.2397
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