From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.2-2 i586) Description of problem: Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. start mc in a virtual terminal (not xterm) 2. press ctrl-o 3. Actual Results: MC stops receiving input, a kill successfully terminates it, whatever i typed will appear. Expected Results: It should give me a shell access. Additional info:
I just tested this in: [root@rawhide# rpm -q mc mc-4.5.51-36 and it works fine on s390, x86, alpha, ia64 for me. Whatever the problem was, it is either fixed now, or was some temporary glitch. I use CTRL-O all the time in mc, and have not encountered such a problem. The only possible thing I can think of is if you were possibly using Ximian GNOME, which replaces mc with their own version. Closing bug as unable to reproduce in above release.
I don't know what causes it, right now i use the downloaded source from www.gnome.org/mc (version 4.5.55) which doesn't hang up. Some of their previous releases hung too, but i didn't find anything important in the changelog. If mine is the only case then *shrug*.
More people have reported the same bug, including me. I filed it under #55273, which I'm now marking as duplicate of this one. And yes, upgrading to latest 4.5.55 from gnome.org does solve this, although we no longer get cons.saver, which is a pity.
*** Bug 55273 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
The reason it fails is that the kernel no longer supports needed TIOCLINUX ioctls (grep cons.saver.c for TIOCLINUX) and cons.saver dies when asked to send screen contents. The SIGCHLD handler restarts cons.saver, but the new copy doesn't know about the request to send screen contents and the processes are waiting for each other.
Huh? the 7.1 kernel doesn't support the IOCTLs either and I can't remember these hangs on 7.1
Will this help if I tell that mc hangs because /bin/login (util-linux) no longer chowns /dev/vcs and /dev/vcsa? Changelog of util-linux indicates that this was done intentionally, but why???