severity 712883 grave thanks $ grep upg.*chew /var/log/dpkg.log 2013-06-21 08:29:13 upgrade libchewing3:i386 0.3.4-1 0.3.4-2 2013-06-21 08:29:15 upgrade libchewing3-data:i386 0.3.4-1 0.3.4-2 This caused a big disaster, shells died, no scim. 2013-06-21 16:26:16 upgrade libchewing3:i386 0.3.4-2 0.3.4-1 2013-06-21 16:26:17 upgrade libchewing3-data:i386 0.3.4-2 0.3.4-1 This fixed it, upon restart of nodm.