I've also seen this, on both real systems and on VMWare virtual
machines. But I have a few additional observations, which might make
it easier to pin down:
1) Interestingly, if you strace the X server when the greeter is not
able to respond to input, you can see that the X server is definitely
receiving input from the keyboard. So I don't think it's the X server
that's at fault (which makes sense given that xdm works fine too).
2) I also found that if I tried the "Configure the login manager"
link, and type in the root password (correctly) the password doesn't
even appear as stars, but something interesting happens: the
configuration dialog does not appear, but gdm kills itself with signal
17, restarts and as with other ways of restarting gdm, everything
works fine after that.
3) It looks to be related to the theme. If I set the gdm style to
Plain, it always works correctly.
Interestingly I have two Debian Etch virtual machines on my Mac. One
of them behaves perfectly, the other has this problem. I will begin
looking through the differences in the sets of packages installed to
see if I can find something else which may be influencing this
behaviour.
Tim
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The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research
Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a
company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered
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