My attempt to run gnome-terminal under gdb has come to a stage where a "progress" report is appropriate.
I tried several ways to initiate gdm and gnome-terminal from a console (which is outside of Xwindows and therefore outside of Gnome. I tried to install and get working 'bug-buddy' Using aptitude to install new packages needed to be done carefully since it was pretty determined to replace my gnome-terminal with debugging symbols, with its own package that does not have the symbols. A reboot seemed require. Wnen the computer came back up Gnome had new behavior that made it effectively an unusable environment, at least for me. Everything I tried seemed to reduce the usability of Gnome. I lost my ability to send and receive email. I decided to make a clean new install of Lenny since that, at least, was something that I knew how to do. The install was delayed by a breakdown in service. I have spent most of today fixing up things that don't happen automatically in an install, getting my fstab, and hosts right, etc. During this I was constantly using gnome-terminal and frequently adjusting color schemes and there has been not a single crash. (Aside: I need to adjust color because the command line interfaces to aptitude, dpkg-reconfigure, mutt, all make color high-lighting choices that are unreadable by me. It is not an esthetic issue. I simply can't read dark blue letters on a black background and other strange combinations.) So whatever was there was, to say the least, made far less easy to detect. Based on the experience today, I do not expect to be able to reproduce the problem with sufficient frequency to justify further work on it. My initial Lenny installation was done months ago, well before the official release. A clean new install may have cleaned out some cruft that somehow managed to accumulate. The old Lenny that I abandoned is still on my HD in a separate partition. If anyone has the skill and the interest, they can have a copy, bit-for-bit, for a forensic investigation. I'm keeping it in case I discover that I need to retrieve something that I forgot to copy over to the new Lenny. (I was rather restrictive in what I copied because I knew there was toxic waste, or software prions, or something else really bad in it.) Thanks for your help, and please don't ask me to close this bug. I would probably screw it up, and in the process make someone cranky. -- Paul E Condon pecon...@mesanetworks.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org