Re: mc not loading and not dying (sid)

[Linas Zvirblis <0x0007@gmail.com>]

Richard Lyons wrote:

> Anyone else had funny behaviour from mc lately?  I have a recent sid
> install with mc 1:1.6.1-1.  It was working yesterday (or maybe the day
> before).  Today, when I call it, the terminal (xterm, mrxvt, or in
> console, makes no difference) background is blacked, and a small cursor
> appears at the end of the first line -- then it freezes and is
> unkillable.  I now have six mc processes showing in ps, but cannot
> kill any of them.  I haven't updated the system, the only changes I
> remember are installing DBI modules and, this morning, acroread.  And
> acroread is also freezing if I try to save a file -- on second thoughts,
> perhaps this is related.  I've just checked and there are immortal
> acroreads in there too.

My bets are on acroread, because:

1) It is not in Debian, so nobody checked for what it does on ones system.
2) Being non-free software it can do whatever weird things it does 
without you knowing it.

Run debsums and see if it messed up anything and reinstall the affected 
packages. By the way, there is no such thing as unkillable, "killall -9 
mc" and "killall -9 acroread" should get rid of them.