Christian Jaeger wrote: > Today I did the usual dist-upgrade for my "testing" install, and it > left me with a badly broken (from user's perspective) installation, > because basically all Gnome applications stopped working. After a bit > over 2 hours worth of investigation, I've found out how to solve the > issue; since I first looked here and didn't find anything gnome > related, I'm sending this to the list for the casual other victim. > > Symptom: Gnome apps just hang, without outputting anything to > stdout/stderr (or .xsession-errors if started through the menu). > > Problem: the apps segfault inside libxml2, and thereafter enter a > deadlocked state in a mutex (or in a select call); the former is > apparently a bug in libxml2, the latter seems to be the Gnome > functionality to pop up a windows which seems to have an issue on it's > own (so it's really two bugs happening here, obscuring the > investigation a bit.) > > Solution: install libxml2 from unstable; this is actually a downgrade > (from libxml2 2.6.32.dfsg-2+lenny to 2.6.32.dfsg-2). I.e. "apt-get > install -t unstable libxml2/unstable", but you need to have the > unstable sources in apt.sources and use apt pinning (I won't explain > that here, check other sources).
Hi Christian, thanks for the warning and solution. After my dist-upgrade last night, gdm would not start (it gave me a "The greeter program appears to be crashing" message, and never got to the login screen). But I could start Xorg with 'startx' and all my Gnome programs worked fine (including gnome-appearance-properties). Downgrading libxml2 to the pre-security-update version fixed gdm, so now everything works. Have you opened a bug report on this anywhere? I'm on a Lenovo X60 Tablet, Core Duo: 2.6.26-1-686 #1 SMP Wed Aug 20 12:56:41 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux - Chris Burkhardt -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
