Xorg Hangs-was Gnome-panel hangs

[karlp at ourldsfamily.com]

On Thu, June 1, 2006 3:15 pm, karlp at ourldsfamily.com said:
>
> 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.
>

Update:

I found that I was missing codecs. I installed just mplayer-codecs and things
seem to have tamed down a bunch.

But, if the codecs were hosed and I removed them sometime back, how did
mplayer work at all? Are there 'built-in' codecs mplayer relies on?

Now, if only totem came with ANYTHING to make it work, I could try it. Xine
works okay, but I installed Ogle, and am happy again with DVD playing.

Karl