B.4. Programs are failing oddly. What's going on?

Programs can fail oddly for a number of possible reasons, but a common explanation is that you're out of disk space. Check the disk usage in a Terminal with the df command:

[kermit@swinetrek ~]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                       12G  1.8G  8.8G  17% /
/dev/hda2              99M  9.8M   84M  11% /boot
/dev/shm               62M     0   62M   0% /dev/shm
[kermit@swinetrek ~]$ 

The Used and Avail columns show how much space is used and available on each partition on your machine . If a partition is nearly or completely full, it may be the cause of your problem; find some files to delete from that partition to see if it helps. Good candidates are log files , which are stored in the /var/log directory.