[csw-users] gnome session random hangs or freezes

[Dennis Clarke]

> After upgraded using CSW unstable repository for my gnome desktop last
> week, I found the gnome session became extremely unstable or is not
> usable.
>
> The whole session or screen freezes or hangs randomly after a period of
> time: the screen is not responsible, the mouse can move around, but
> click anything in screen has no response at all. I tried login remotely
> to kill some processes such as nautilus, dbus-daemon, gnome-panel. But
> that does not help at all, only kill gnome-session will restart X
> session and re-enter the login screen.
>
> This problem happens mostly when I close gnome applications, not every
> time, but eventually 9 out of 10 will get into this situation. Looks
> like gnome-session is waiting for an certain process to finish to go on
> but the process never return.
>
> Anybody has any suggestion or recommendation ? Any idea how to track
> down where the problem exact is ? Right now, I can only blame
> gnome-session, but it may caused by other processes.
>
> If you also know a way to track down/debug/view log in this situation,
> your help is appreciated

Thank you for sending in a nice letter. I get emails and I see bug reports
that often times just are full of screaming from people. It is nice to see
someone that just says "this isn't working right .. any ideas why?"

I do a fair amount of testing with GNOME and other things :

    http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/images/csw-gnome_010.jpg

I have been seeing similar behavior from GNOME over the past few weeks and
am trying to figure out what is the issue. I have to ssh into the test
machine and kill off everything that belongs to my userid to get my desktop
back. It seems to be one components that is the problem .. but it is very
tough to isolate and debug.

In some cases .. everything seems to just work :

    http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/images/csw-gnome_006.jpg

In others I lose the ability to kill off a single window .. it hangs there
with a frame but no way to kill it :

    http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/images/csw-gnome_005.jpg

The xterm is gone but the frame remains. Like stolen artwork.

Then things go back to working again :

    http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/images/csw-gnome_003.jpg

This is my desktop right now :

    http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/images/csw-gnome_014.jpg

I know that I have some CSW software in there that is not yet released
because of testing. I have a newer GTK2 and a newer glib2 ( 2.14.4 ) and I
have to go push some windows around and launch a pile of stuff to see if I
can get into that mes again.

We hear you .. we do.

The trick is to work together to create this all encompassing monster called
GNOME for any Solaris user from Solaris 8 upwards.


-
Dennis Clarke