Re: Lenny users: attn about Gnome/libxml2 breakage
Christian Jaeger wrote:
> Today I did the usual dist-upgrade for my "testing" install, and it
> left me with a badly broken (from user's perspective) installation,
> because basically all Gnome applications stopped working. After a bit
> over 2 hours worth of investigation, I've found out how to solve the
> issue; since I first looked here and didn't find anything gnome
> related, I'm sending this to the list for the casual other victim.
>
> Symptom: Gnome apps just hang, without outputting anything to
> stdout/stderr (or .xsession-errors if started through the menu).
>
> Problem: the apps segfault inside libxml2, and thereafter enter a
> deadlocked state in a mutex (or in a select call); the former is
> apparently a bug in libxml2, the latter seems to be the Gnome
> functionality to pop up a windows which seems to have an issue on it's
> own (so it's really two bugs happening here, obscuring the
> investigation a bit.)
>
> Solution: install libxml2 from unstable; this is actually a downgrade
> (from libxml2 2.6.32.dfsg-2+lenny to 2.6.32.dfsg-2). I.e. "apt-get
> install -t unstable libxml2/unstable", but you need to have the
> unstable sources in apt.sources and use apt pinning (I won't explain
> that here, check other sources).
Hi Christian, thanks for the warning and solution.
After my dist-upgrade last night, gdm would not start (it gave me a "The
greeter program appears to be crashing" message, and never got to the
login screen). But I could start Xorg with 'startx' and all my Gnome
programs worked fine (including gnome-appearance-properties).
Downgrading libxml2 to the pre-security-update version fixed gdm, so now
everything works.
Have you opened a bug report on this anywhere?
I'm on a Lenovo X60 Tablet, Core Duo:
2.6.26-1-686 #1 SMP Wed Aug 20 12:56:41 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
- Chris Burkhardt
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