This is going to be a long story made short.....

I never had any problem installing Debian [Testing] on my box, and every desktop environment ran fine except for Gnome. I continually had a problem with X freezing and tried everything from installing video drivers, changing kernels, re-configuring X, replacing XF86 with Xorg, and tinkering with about anything else you could imagine that had to do with the X packages. I never had any success, but mind you all the time KDE, Xfce, and Fluxbox ran fine. I did conclude that the issue must reside somewhere specifically with Gnome but since it always happened on even the default net-install packages I could never find the conflict.

That didn't change until I installed the alsa-utils & related packages, and used them to configure my sound card. This immediately stopped all the X freezes in Gnome. I only decided to pursue this path after it dawned on me that all my freezes occurred while the sound server was running. I to this day have no idea why this occurred or why my "fix" worked.

Enter this week. The problem again was with Gnome and this time the freeze in X occurred after GDM was loaded but before the desktop appeared. If I renamed my hidden Gnome config folders in /home and reset X I could again start a Gnome session with the default settings. However, after enabling the 'sounds for events' option in the Sound Preferences the system would do a hard freeze immediately. If I rebooted and tried to begin a new session the desktop would once more fail to appear.

This time no amount of sound configuration would change the outcome. So I started looking at what alsa packages were installed, and tried to see if deleting any would cause a lot of dependencies to come into play. I found a couple (just plugin types) that didn't trigger any further package removals and uninstalled them. This made no difference. Then I looked at the libesd-alsa0 package and it turned out this was the conflicting library. Once I removed it and installed libesd0 in its place all the freezes stopped. I'd been using libesd-alsa0 for several weeks before any problems surfaced, and it only started after some newer Gnome packages came into the testing repos.

What they heck is going on here? Why would sound play such a role in X?

Hey Xian,

I'm running Fedora Core 4 and I was experiencing similar problems with my system locking up and I narrowed it down to running XMMS as a user. Running XMMS as root everything was fine. After browsing various forums something clicked and I realized that the difference between my user's setup and root's was that my user was running Sound Server with system sounds enabled. Once I disabled Sound Server startup no more freezing while running XMMS as a user.

Since I am a newbie I couldn't even begin to try to understand where the problem may be. Could there be an issue with ALSA ?

Hope this helps somebody out there.

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Jesus is coming... everyone look busy!!