I recently had a spot of trouble with GNOME. I'm using a 256 colo(u)r display and this frequently results in applications not being able to find/allocate colormap entries. I also leave myself logged in overnight with a xlock running. I recently came in to work to discover my ~/.xsession-errors file had grown to a staggering 300MB of "can't allocate colormap entry" messages and consumed my available / home partition space. To avoid this problem I've linked my ~/.xsession-errors -> /dev/console so that errors are printed to the xconsole window (or text virtual terminal if using startx). I'd like to know if anyone can see any problems with using this approach and if it could be safely recommended as a standard practice for 8bit displays. Probably a filter for sorting uncommon messages and loggin them would be advisable I suppose. Please. Comments and discussion.
