Xorg Hangs-was Gnome-panel hangs

[karlp at ourldsfamily.com]

On Thu, June 1, 2006 2:42 pm, Rick Stevens said:
> On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 12:13 -0600, karlp at ourldsfamily.com wrote:
>> On Thu, June 1, 2006 10:50 am, Rick Stevens said:
>> > On Wed, 2006-05-31 at 22:38 -0600, karlp at ourldsfamily.com wrote:
>> >> On Fri, May 12, 2006 10:36 pm, karlp at ourldsfamily.com said:
>> >> > I thought this issue was solved. FC5 updated and the problem seemed to
>> go
>> >> > away. Yesterday it came back. The panel freezes and gnome apps die if I
>> >> access
>> >> > the menu. It happes in KDE and xfce, too. So, I've come to the
>> conclusion
>> >> that
>> >> > it's Xorg. As a matter of fact, it may be even deeper than that as it
>> >> doesn't
>> >> > solve the problem to do CTRL-ALT-BKSPC. I get a new session, but it
>> goes
>> >> back
>> >> > into I-don't-wanna-play-nice mode even quicker on the re-login. I have
>> to
>> >> > reboot to get a clean session, which hangs after about 5-20 minutes.
>> >> >
>> >> > Please, any ideas. I've got FC5 installed on my new workstation at work
>> >> and
>> >> > can't put it into service if this isn't solved. My home PC is the test
>> and
>> >> > play box where I hope to solve this.
>> >>
>> >> Okay, I've figured something out, but the solution evades me, other than
>> >> non-use of the offending application. What is it?
>> >>
>> >> mplayer-1.0pre8-0.7.20060418
>> >>
>> >> I typically listen to online radio with mplayer. When I run it, the panel
>> >> dies
>> >> in either gnome, KDE or xfce. Strange but true. I've had KDE up for 3
>> hours
>> >> and then ran mplayer to show my son some WoW vids he created that were on
>> an
>> >> older hard disk he was going to format because he couldn't access it in
>> >> WinXP-Semi-Pro (yum install kmod-ntfs;mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt/rmv)
>> >>
>> >> So, any thoughts now?
>> >
>> > Which Linux are you running, Karl, and are you fully updated?  I know
>> > there were some issues with mplayer on FC5's default gnome.
>>
>> FC5, fully updated. I manually run yum update as well as having it 'cron'ed.
>>
>> I do have a few extra repos setup:
>>
>> [fedora 7 repos]
>> freshrpms
>> greysector
>> livna [3 repos]
>> macromedia
>>
>> I've worried about things a bit, but last night, exactly at the time I
>> clicked
>> 'SEND' on this email, I noticed my sound was also dead and killed the artsd
>> daemon, which restarted, and my panels came back to life in KDE. So, things
>> are much better, but I'm also not running mplayer to radio stations anymore.
>
> Hmmm.  I don't use mplayer very often.  For radio, I typically use xmms.
> There may be an issue with the handling of one of the codecs under
> mplayer--particularly if it started life as a Windows codec.  It'd be
> interesting if you could specify different stream formats for the
> stations and see if one format caused the error.  If so, then I'd really
> suspect the codec.

I suspect you are right. One major problem with mplayer in the current
situation is that some formats don't come across clearly. They are just static
and noise... I'm wondering if I back off the codecs and install different
ones... Experimentation coming... Time isn't, drat.

I can do xmms. I used to use it a lot until the mp3 stuff came up. But, I rip
to ogg now so that's not even an issue too much, other than the 300+ mp3s I
like.

Karl