[Partly solved]regular crash to desktop

[Tinker]

Running latest version I get regular, as in once or twice a day. I Now run from the command line to get error messages and always get

 /bin/urw: line 170: 30476 Segmentation fault      (core dumped) "${URW_BIN_DIR}"/"${URW_BIN}"

The ctd does not seem to be related to any particular action I perform. Using Arch linux.

[Tinker]

After some further testing I have found that I also lose some inventory items when I restart.

It would be appriciated if someone could suggest a method to track the cause of the ctd.

[Sami]

Seems like super hard to track as there's no consistency with crashes. Arch can be tricky one but I believe there are people who are running the game stable on Arch.
You could try searching the forums for "arch" and see if somebody has pondered/solved similar problems in the past.
Also, you can enable debugs logs when the game is running (main play screen) by pressing symbol & 
it asks you to enable logs so you know it's running.
After that the game activity is logged to several differnt debug_*.txt files in games installation folder. They can provide me some information, and you can e-mail them to me after the next crash. Debug logs are resetted everytime you start the game again.

If you are playing with any mods at all, first try to run vanilla game with zero modifications or tinkering.

[Tinker]

Thanks for the tip, I might actually solve it myself if I have some debug output, though with closed source I might have problems if it is  urw based error. It was crashing with just the vanilla setup.

[Tinker]

I did find an old post of a similar problem here, which suggests a problem with sdl, I did once get a message that sdl.config might be to old, but it was updated last 2 months ago and there is no newer version.

Just to be sure I reinstalled sdl and have been running urw with debug logs for 4 hours without problem, I will need to test longer before saying that was the problem.

[Sami]

I did find an old post of a similar problem here, which suggests a problem with sdl, I did once get a message that sdl.config might be to old, but it was updated last 2 months ago and there is no newer version.

Just to be sure I reinstalled sdl and have been running urw with debug logs for 4 hours without problem, I will need to test longer before saying that was the problem.

So far so good, which is great. Keep us updated, at some point, how things did turn out in the end.
SDL interferences (on variety of Linux distros) seem to have been surprisingly common. I'll keep my thumbs up for you.

[Tinker]

After a marathon of 14 hours playing I got another ctd. Looking at the debug logs there was not anything standout as an error in urw, apart from the odd mix of Norwegian and English in most entries. 

The logs were by this time several hundred Mb, not practical for me to post with my 3rd world internet. I does however seem to be a system fault with my Linux, I will carry on testing after investigating my sdl setup.

[Sami]

After a marathon of 14 hours playing I got another ctd. Looking at the debug logs there was not anything standout as an error in urw, apart from the odd mix of Norwegian and English in most entries. 

If there's Norwegian something is terribly wrong..  See, it should be mix of Finnish and English.

The logs were by this time several hundred Mb, not practical for me to post with my 3rd world internet. I does however seem to be a system fault with my Linux, I will carry on testing after investigating my sdl setup.

Okay, even though this kind of repeating text stuff gets compressed with amazing ratio. Good luck with your investigations. SDL site also hosts bugzilla, where you may also find Arch reports, and possible solutions also:
https://bugzilla.libsdl.org/

[Tinker]

Tok a bit of tracking down, but I did find there had been a firmware upgrade for the audio chip. It may have been due to support for very old audio systems getting dropped from Linux kernel or from sdl, in ant case there was an updated firmware in AUR which solved the problem of intermittent crashes after 5 hours, so urw is now playable.

There is still a small problem, when exiting urw there is an audio buffer underrun every time, but this does not seem to affect anything though it does seem to be a urw problem. I also have a different audio problem with widelands not exiting cleanly, it does not report the buffer underrun but does kill the unresponsive audio after 5 seconds, again it does not affect playing and currently there is a sdl audio code review occuring in widelands which may solve the solution.