squeeze: graphical environment broken

[Bob Tracy <rct@gherkin.frus.com>]

Just thought I'd see if anyone else was experiencing severe brokenness
with an up-to-date "squeeze" on Alpha.

The recent upgrade from kde3 to kde4 broke kde: plasma takes a SIGSEGV
early, so there's no usable session to be had there.  At least the
pieces that continue running can be killed manually so that "gdm" can
reinitialize the display.  I hadn't bothered reporting any of the issues
with kde4 because I assumed they were known, and besides, I still had
gnome :-).

Then, recent updates to gnome managed to kill *that* windowing
environment.  "gnome-settings-daemon" first quit working with FreeNX,
then finally quit working with console logins.  I could still get a
usable gnome session running until a few days ago.  Now, the main
toolbar at the bottom of the screen shows up, but that's pretty much it.
Shortly after the toolbar appears and the standard Debian wallpaper gets
painted, the session hangs *hard*.  If you aren't already logged-in on
one of the virtual ttys, forget it: the login hangs immediately after
the motd appears.  If you *are* logged-in on a virtual tty, but not as
root, you can't "su": it too hangs.  If you're logged in as root on one
of the virtual ttys, you can't kill the hung gnome processes, and you
can't even do a graceful shutdown.  Can't access the machine remotely
via ssh: that hangs too.  Bottom line: can't recover except by hitting
the reset switch.

So, I'm patiently retrieving updates from the command line using
"apt-get", and hoping for the fix to eventually show up.  In the
meantime, if there's any meaningful debugging I can do that would narrow
things down a bit for a clueful person, please don't hesitate to ask.
Sorry for the non-specific bug report, but I personally haven't seen
things this badly broken in userland for a long time...

-- 
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Bob Tracy          |  "Talk is cheap because supply exceeds demand."
rct@frus.com       |   -- Bill Kennedy
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