Wheezy x86 desktop issues

Hi

Having battled with these the last couple of days the below may be of use if anyone else hits them

After heavy use of Libre-Office printing large documents, the next boot and all subsequent ones failed with a segfault
colord-sane segfault error 6 in libdbus-1.so.3.7.2

This is the segfaulting of libdbus in Libre Office linked to it, bizarrely it occurs quite often after Libre Office exits
www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=49973

When I started to look into it, seems like colord is broken in Wheezy and would require such a root and branch change that it was left until Jessie
This is what colord is supposed to do, it is a system daemon which starts automatically when 'required' to assist with colour management
www.freedesktop.org/software/colord/intro.html

This is its CPU usage problem, it appears not to be 'thread-safe', I haven't looked in depth but assume this means it starts them and does not kill old ones
gradually consuming more and more resources
bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=668325

and general segfault error
bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=668225

There are lots more and these are not the definitive bug reports, just the first illustrative ones I turned up just now.

You can remove the package colord, without great impact, which I have done, which cures the boot problem.
I may look at backporting the Jessie package later, if the dependencies can be met.

The second issue is the ubiquitous RealTek r8111 / r8168 ethernet chip
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I thought I was quite OK, mine uses the later r8169 module and seemed to work

After removing colord (how could they possibly be connected!) the next boot the ethernet link did not come up
I got around it by entering a terminal log in, rmmod r8169, modprobe r8169, then startx into the Window Manager (just like the 1990s!)

When I was digging around the /etc/network scripts, it occurred to me that both if-up.d and if-pre-up.d have ethtool scripts which just exit if ethtool does not exist
Wheezy does not seem to install it by default in the desktop install

ethtool installed, rebooted and as by magic, up comes the ethernet link at boot.

Can't guarantee it will assist any problem you have, but worth a try

(I hate Realtek so much, I now have an Intel based PCIe mini ethernet card coming)

regards