Re: Freezing on functions that run as root

[Simon Kitching <skitching apache org>]

On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 17:23 -0500, David A. Cobb wrote:
> Hi,  I'm new at this from Windows ["Free, at last; Free, at last!  Thank 
> ..."]
> 
> Running Gnome on Debian 'sarge', kernel 2.4.26 (backport).
> Fairly often, if I log in as a normal user and then try RootTerminal or 
> Synaptic, that require a root password, the dialog box for the password 
> gets about half painted -- just the background white and gray -- then 
> everything freezes solid.  The system does not respond to mouse or 
> keyboard and all I can do is hit the Reset button.  On the reboot, there 
> are a bunch of bad iNodes in my /tmp filesystem. 
> 
> I've had similar things happen on just user-login, but not nearly as 
> frequent.  There the solution was to boot Single and rename the user's 
> ".gnome*" files so they would be created fresh.  The same sort of thing 
> helps in this case -- I wipe out any ".gnome*" files in /root and try 
> again.  Usually it helps.  And sometimes the problem just seems to go 
> away. 
> 
> Possibly a configuration glitch, but I don't have any idea where to look.

I can't help you with the cause of the problem. However when this
happens again it may be worth trying ctrl-alt-backspace. This should
command the X server to shutdown, bouncing you back to the gdm/kdm login
screen. This at least avoids having to reboot the machine..

Regards,

Simon