Problems are solved! For the answer, see below. I suspect that, for the first time, I am making a useful contribution here that may help others.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Fletcher" <mark2...@gmail.com> To: "Alan McConnell" <a...@his.com>, debian-user@lists.debian.org Sent: Wednesday, April 6, 2016 10:13:22 AM Subject: Re: Three Problems Yet Remaining The first and most important problem is: my iceweasel crashes instantaneously upon being invoked, whether from the Activities list on the LH side or from the command line. It was totally reliable under wheezy. Second: my mutt, invoked from the terminal/command line. crashes instantaneously also. Before I resigned myself to the gnome environment, it ran fine. I suspect the cause of these 2 issues is the same. We'd need to see log files eg /var/log/messages or something, or maybe the xsession-errors file, to make any progress on what might be the problem. Are you running Jessie now? I'm running Iceweasel on Jessie on amd64 architecture with no stability problems. What I did was to install the vmlinuz-3.16.0-4-686-pae kernel. As I wrote a long time ago, I tried to install this when in the midst of installing jessie , but I couldn't do it. So I went to another kernel, and had all the problems I last complained about. Physical Address Extension is what pae stands for. and I advise all who can to use it. My iceweasel runs fine, totally robust. My mutt, ditto. 'file' is there, and works. 'touch', previously missing, now works. The one thing I don't have is sound, and I can fight that through on my own, I hope. I've done it before<g>. Thanks to all for the suggestions, and even for the chastisements<G>. I hope that some day some one will figure out about COMRESET, which continues to delay my boot. Alan, writing this from his own computer!