Can someone help me to troubleshoot system crashes and lockups which result in compiz/cairo dock and gnome-panel crashing? I also get no window borders after the crash and a lot of kernel memory errors. Logs are telling me that apps were killed due to not enough memory, but the system is caching like 14GB of my ram so I'm a bit stuck on what/how to stop it.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.10 on a 2011 Mac Mini with 16 GB ram. Here's some of the logs that look like they could be causing trouble. I woke up this morning to find chrome/skype/cairo dock and a few others had been killed and here is what the log said.

Nov  5 04:00:45 linkandzelda-Macmini kernel: [ 9310.959890] Out of memory: Kill process 12247 (chromium-browse) score 101 or sacrifice child
Nov  5 04:00:45 linkandzelda-Macmini kernel: [ 9310.959893] Killed process 12247 (chromium-browse) total-vm:238948kB, anon-rss:17064kB, file-rss:20008kB
Nov  5 04:00:45 linkandzelda-Macmini kernel: [ 9310.972283] Out of memory: Kill process 10976 (dropbox) score 3 or sacrifice child
Nov  5 04:00:45 linkandzelda-Macmini kernel: [ 9310.972288] Killed process 10976 (dropbox) total-vm:316392kB, anon-rss:115484kB, file-rss:16504kB
Nov  5 04:00:45 linkandzelda-Macmini kernel: [ 9310.975890] Out of memory: Kill process 10887 (rhythmbox) score 3 or sacrifice child
Nov  5 04:00:45 linkandzelda-Macmini kernel: [ 9310.975895] Killed process 11515 (tray_icon_worke) total-vm:63336kB, anon-rss:15960kB, file-rss:11436kB
Nov  5 04:00:45 linkandzelda-Macmini kernel: [ 9311.281535] Out of memory: Kill process 10887 (rhythmbox) score 3 or sacrifice child
Nov  5 04:00:45 linkandzelda-Macmini kernel: [ 9311.281539] Killed process 10887 (rhythmbox) total-vm:528980kB, anon-rss:92272kB, file-rss:36520kB
Nov  5 04:00:45 linkandzelda-Macmini kernel: [ 9311.283110] Out of memory: Kill process 10889 (skype) score 3 or sacrifice child
Nov  5 04:00:45 linkandzelda-Macmini kernel: [ 9311.283113] Killed process 10889 (skype) total-vm:415056kB, anon-rss:84880kB, file-rss:22160kB

I went to look deeper into things and saw that the whole time I'm having these kernel errors with out of memory and something mentioning radeon. I have a Radeon HD 6600M graphics card using the open source driver, not the proprietary one. I was wondering if perhaps using the proprietary one would solve the problem.

Also, while writing this in Chrome rhythmbox and chrome just got killed while typing this, due to out of memory errors or so it reports, though I have 7 GB of free RAM at the time with 7 GB cached as well. Here is a full copy of my logs that happened in kern.log simply from when I began typing this question.

http://pastebin.com/cdxxDktG

Thanks in advance, Kris