I’m running into a frequent and annoying lockup in Feisty that seems to be related to the pcmanfm-nohal package I got out of the Feisty repos. I’m excited that PCManFM is in the repos, but this is a little troubling.

There’s no crash report to speak of — it’s a hard lockup that freezes X and all the terminal sessions. The mouse cursor still moves and I can power down with the off button, but aside from that there’s no other system activity that I can access.

I’m trying the 0.3.2.2 deb by way of the PCManFM home page, but I can’t seem to find a changelog so I don’t know if this is part of an improvement or if it’s something unrelated. I think, to be honest, Feisty might be partly to blame.

For the meantime I’ve downloaded the Xfe 0.99-1 deb from the Xfe home page and installed it alongside libfox-1.6-0. If 0.3.2.2 doesn’t make everything better, I’ll use Xfe most of the time.

Xfe is not as pretty as PCManFM, and I’m addicted to tabbed navigation, but it’s faster and if it doesn’t lock my machine, it’s an improvement. It’s a little ironic that Xfe in the repos is still mired at v0.88, but with a working deb off the project home page, I’m content.

Truth be told, if Feisty keeps locking up with a different file manager, I’ll be happy.