You shouldn't be running things as root unless they really need it. That said, it shouldn't SEGV because of that. Try adding xterm to Personal Menu, to run as root, and run inside GDB then. Running an xterm as "user" and becoming root by means of rootsh, root, sudo gainroot and such things will not necessarily give the same result.

Also see if a "core" file gets generated outside gdb. That could be helpful too, although I have never seen a core file generated on my system so there may be some trick to getting them generated on Maemo (which I have not fully investigated).