FYI,
I run Debian Sarge on a P4 Dell Dimension 8400 workstation. I use
a self-compiled kernel and the proprietary ATI driver for my X300SE
video card. I also have an older machine (HP Pavilion 8766C) with
proprietary NVidia drivers for the onboard Vanta dinosaur.
On my older machine I had set up 2 user accounts, one for everyday
usage and another for more serious work which I want to protect from
loss in case of internet security problems. This worked well, though
creating the new account revealed a few problems with Debian I
wouldn't have known about otherwise: using the "Cursor" font in Sarge
causes 'nautilus' to crash; and the 'esd' sound daemon randomly fails
to shut down when logging out, preventing the next user from being
able to use sound. (The fixes are: don't use the "Cursor" font with
Sarge, and kill the 'esd' process and login again.)
On my new machine today, I was setting up that second account and
copying files via NFS so that I can reconfigure the old machine for
other uses. I discovered that switching between user accounts would
cause Debian freeze during a logout -- the machine was unresponsive to
the keyboard except for a Ctl-Alt-Delete shutdown. (Several times
even that failed, forcing me to use the dreaded power button,
resulting in an 'fsck' cycle on reboot.)
Googling for clues, I found references to a 'gdm' configuration
option that forces the X server to shutdown and restart at a user
logout, instead of reusing the same X server instance. That has cured
my problem: I can now do as many logout/login cycles as I want
without problems.
I don't know what part of the system is failing -- my guess is that
it is a problem with the proprietary video driver -- but because I'm
using a tainted kernel there is no point in reporting this as a bug
using the BTS. If anyone out there ever has the same problem edit
this file:
/etc/gdm/gdm.conf
and look for a setting called "AlwaysRestartServer" and set it to
"true". It helped in my case, but YMMV. If you're having a similar
problem it's worth a try, though.
HTH,
Dave W.
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