Bug#699138: general: Tor, opera, chrom(ium), others lock up gnome on Acer 722. Can not access other CLI terminals.
Package: general
Severity: important
Dear Maintainer,
I have recently installed Debian Wheezy on an Acer AspireOne 722. This hardware
required installing firmware-linux-nonfree to get full gnome3 functionality.
Wheezy locks up frequently on this machine. The lock-up is complete. Neither
keys nor touchpad work. I can not ctrl-alt-F1 to a terminal. I must hold down
the power button to resart the machine.
I can not discern what causes the lock-ups. Manually installed web applications
seem more likely to trigger one. Thus, Iceweasel generally will not cause a
problem. Chrome and Chromium will lock up on startup and during browsing
frequently enough to discourage the use of these programs. Opera has never
launched because Wheezy locks up after the EULA. TorBrowser has never launched
because Wheezy locks up as Vidalia attempts to connect. Wheezy will also
occasionally lock up again upon reboot, prior to the login screen. A second
reboot will usually clear the problem. I have since uninstalled Opera, Tor, and
Chrome, and performance improved for a time thereafter.
I had remained hopeful that an apt-get upgrade would eventually resolve these
issues. After one such upgrade, I found Chromium to work to my satisfaction.
I therefore tested Tor yesterday to see if the issue had been resolved there.
Wheezy locked up again while attmpting to run tor. As usual, I shut down by
holding the power button. I have not been able to boot into the gnome shell
since. It now locks up after the login screen, just when I expect the gnome
panel to appear. In recovery mode, I purged tor and autoremoved other tor
packages. The problem persisted, but I found I was able to boot into gnome
classic, which is what I am now using to file this report. I have since purged
and reinstalled gnome-shell and gnome-desktop-environment. The problem persists.
This is a shame because I was starting to greatly enjoy my Debian Wheezy
installation, in spite of these inconveniences. Keep up the good work!
~Tim G.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.0
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
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