Just thought I'd see if anyone else was experiencing severe brokenness with an up-to-date "squeeze" on Alpha.
The recent upgrade from kde3 to kde4 broke kde: plasma takes a SIGSEGV early, so there's no usable session to be had there. At least the pieces that continue running can be killed manually so that "gdm" can reinitialize the display. I hadn't bothered reporting any of the issues with kde4 because I assumed they were known, and besides, I still had gnome :-). Then, recent updates to gnome managed to kill *that* windowing environment. "gnome-settings-daemon" first quit working with FreeNX, then finally quit working with console logins. I could still get a usable gnome session running until a few days ago. Now, the main toolbar at the bottom of the screen shows up, but that's pretty much it. Shortly after the toolbar appears and the standard Debian wallpaper gets painted, the session hangs *hard*. If you aren't already logged-in on one of the virtual ttys, forget it: the login hangs immediately after the motd appears. If you *are* logged-in on a virtual tty, but not as root, you can't "su": it too hangs. If you're logged in as root on one of the virtual ttys, you can't kill the hung gnome processes, and you can't even do a graceful shutdown. Can't access the machine remotely via ssh: that hangs too. Bottom line: can't recover except by hitting the reset switch. So, I'm patiently retrieving updates from the command line using "apt-get", and hoping for the fix to eventually show up. In the meantime, if there's any meaningful debugging I can do that would narrow things down a bit for a clueful person, please don't hesitate to ask. Sorry for the non-specific bug report, but I personally haven't seen things this badly broken in userland for a long time... -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bob Tracy | "Talk is cheap because supply exceeds demand." [email protected] | -- Bill Kennedy ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
