On random occasions, usually when I am in the middle of typing an e-mail message using "pine", gnome-terminal will completely freeze up. The freeze affects ALL gnome-terminal windows (including their menu bars), not just the window into which I am typing. Gnome-terminal windows that were hidden behind other windows will not even redraw when re-exposed. Naturally this is a serious situation if you have dozens of shells open in various gnome-terminal windows all performing different tasks, as killing and restarting gnome-terminal will cause them all to be lost. So, the last time it happened I tried to attach an strace to the gnome-terminal process to see what it was stuck on. To my surprise, as soon as I ran "strace -p " followed by the gnome-terminal process id", gnome-terminal immediately unfroze and resumed normal operation. I unfortunately did not get a chance to capture the first few system calls after the strace, as I was so surprised to see it suddenly work. The next time it happens I will capture the strace output in a file. It appears gnome-terminal is blocking on some system call, which the strace interrupted and restarted, and the restarted system call ran fine. (Perhaps it is not even a bug in gnome-terminal but in some system library). I will wait until the next time it happens (which may be a month or so) and post more information then. However, I wanted to post this bug report in the meantime in case it is happening to anyone else, so that they know about the strace workaround. If anyone else sees this problem, start up a different kind of terminal program (such as xterm) -- or switch to a text console via control-alt-F1. Run ps to get the pid of the gnome-terminal process. Then run strace -o debugfile -p pid. This should restart gnome-terminal and if you could post the first few lines of the debugfile created that'd be very helpful. I'll do the same when/if it next happens to me. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gnome-terminal-2.18.4-1.fc8 How reproducible: Random. Happens maybe once or twice a month to me. See above.
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It has not happened again -- probably it was a bug in some external library that got fixed in some other package update. So I'm closing it as CANTFIX -- if it happens again, I'll file a new report in F10.