I apologize for this highly vague and relatively useless bug report, but I have to put something in here. I will try to provide more information. Information on what information to provide will be useful. I am logging in via gdm. I find that my X server crashes somewhat often. I will probably dump gdm for the duration of my fisher testing and start X with xinit so that I can hopefully get a core file or something. I don't know how to reproduce the X server crashes, but I'll work on it. Sometimes the entire X server crashes after exiting from an application. vmware seems to do this pretty often. I think I've had netscape do it too. I also got the X server into a state where it thought my ALT key was down. It was definitely not a keyboard problem. After using CTRL-F1 (remember -- the system thinks I'm pressing ALT) to shift to another virtual console, I had to use the alt key explicitly in the other console. I tried to kill running clients and the X server crashed in the process. After I logged back in, the keyboard behaved normally. Again, I will try to set things up so I can get core files and maybe I can figure out a way of reproducibly crashing the X server, but so far, X seems to crash at least once every few hours. (I'm running Fisher only at home in the evenings and, unfortunately, during the wee hours of the morning....)
You need to provide all the hardware details, as well as config file and xserver output attachments to the bug report. Also, if you are running VMware at ALL, the bug report is useless. VMware installs kernel modules which are proprietary and can hang the machine possibly. In order to get a useful report, you need to totally from a fresh boot NEVER load a vmware module or run vmware - reproduce a crash/hang, and then submit a report. Also, VMware uses DGA, and DGA is not completely solid in 4.0.x yet, so it will likely have problems anyway. Because vmware uses kernel modules anything can happen and I cant replicate it or begin to fix it. It must be replicated without any vmware kernel modules having been loaded from boot.
Thanks for this helpful response. As there are lots of vmware-related problems, I'm going to report this problem to vmware and suggest that they test under Fisher if they aren't already doing so. Hopefully someday soon plex86 or another open source alternative to VMware will make its use unnecessary. Thanks for taking the trouble to respond even though vmware was involved.
Ok great. VMware is a cool tool, but when it is used and the machine locks it's a real catch 22. The kernel guys wont touch bug reports at all if vmware is even in a 10 mile radius. ;o) plex86 is coming along though. It is in powertools now I think. Dunno how useful it is yet though.
FWIW, I haven't had a single X server crash since I stopped running VMWare under Fisher.