Armed with nearly three times the RAM I used to have, I screwed up my courage and tried a plasma-desktop session on the console. It locked up the machine as it did on all prior attempts, but now that the machine isn't paging itself to death, it seems easier to start narrowing down cause and effect.
In particular, the desktop session was running great... Had previously- saved terminal window sessions open and was keeping track of physical memory and swap usage. Just under 100% of 1.5 GB RAM was in use, although much of it was buffering: only a bit over 8 KB of swap was in use. Then, "virtuoso-t" started executing the background. The syslog up to the point of having to press the reset switch is showing tens of thousands of suppressed callbacks, with log entries spaced roughly six seconds apart. "tracker-store" similarly generated lots of suppressed callback messages, but only numbered in the thousands rather than tens of thousands. All of these symptoms are unique to console plasma-desktop sessions. FreeNX plasma-desktop sessions run fine and don't cause the machine any grief that I can tell. An obvious difference between the two session types is the display, and the fact that kernel modesetting is enabled for the console. Kernel is currently the standard kernel.org 3.2.0-rc4. Most of the KDE packages are version 4:4.6.5-n: I do "apt-get upgrade" daily and am running "unstable/sid". The console display is a radeon 7500 (RV200 QW). I'd be happy to open a bug report if someone could provide guidance as to an appropriate package. For now, I'm copying this to the "debian-qt-kde" list in the hope of attracting the right kind of attention :-). Thanks in advance for any help in getting this issue solved. --Bob -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-qt-kde-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20111209150209.ga1...@gherkin.frus.com