Thanks to the very helpful Gordon Thiesfeld, I now believe I've found the bug that was causing Hobbit to lock up and die.

It was - of course - a stupid programming error. It's in all of the Hobbit beta-versions, so it really is quite amazing it hasn't triggered on any of the systems I run Hobbit on internally.

I'd recommend applying the attached patch to your Hobbit 4.0-beta5 sources, then rebuild and restart Hobbit. I.e. :

Save attached patch to /tmp/post-beta5-loop.patch

cd hobbit-4.0-beta5 patch lib/encoding.c < /tmp/post-beta5-loop.patch make make install

Regards, Henrik