After updating my Debian yesterday, I needed to restart because of some kernel changes. At first, nothing unusual, vlc player was working fine, net surfing went without a glitch but… couldn’t start the amarok player : Segmentation fault.

$xine
Segmentation fault

$mplayer
Segmentation fault

$xmms
Segmentation fault

$glxinfo
Segmentation fault

$glxgears
Segmentation fault

Well… seemed pretty serious.

Surprisingly Google was not of any help here (probably due to the difficulty to find the right keywords). I went on reinstalling my nvidia drivers (it was already the latest version NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1.run) but as it controls the sound and video (MCP51), this one was an obvious suspect.

#CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.1 sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1.run

After complaining a lot about missing files, the installation went on and all was working again.