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Old 31st December 2013
quisquous quisquous is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2013
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Quote:
Originally Posted by shep View Post
Gnome3 adds many additional layers, gstreamer pulseaudio and video composting, to the base OS. Some of the layers are not BSD friendly. If you are using totem in fvwm, it likely utilizes pulseaudio and gstreamer. The Parole video player in XFCE4, which is based on Totem, also uses gstreamer but not pulseaudio. I believe in 5.4 and current 2 versions of gstreamer are utilized as gnome3 required the newer version. Also, if you are starting fvwm from gdm, some of these services may be running in the background. top in the fvwm xterm will let you know.

Another option is to try a different video players. Both VLC and mplayer utilize sndio directly and do not depend on gstreamer. Lack of hangs in either of these two media players would tend to focus debugging efforts and also assist you in choosing a desktop.
Thanks shep. I'm able to reproduce the problem when gdm is not running and I run startx using the default fvmw and then run Firefox and leave it open for a couple hours, so its not specific to playing video. Basically running X for a couple hours, regardless of what I'm doing within X, leads to the screen locking up. The screen does not freeze when I'm outside of X, i.e. using a virtual console. I note that it does not freeze on the virtual console even if gdm *is* running. It seems like something that's happening while X controls the screen is leading to the video freeze. When the screen is frozen, CTRL-ALT-F1 does not unfreeze the screen and take me to a virtual console. BUT, notably, when the screen is frozen and I ssh in and issue the reboot command, right before the shutdown sequence finishes and right before the machine reboots, the screen unfreezes and the last shutdown event lines of text appear. So it would seem there may be some way short of a power cycle to get the screen unfrozen.
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