hello all, ive reciently changed distro's from suse to fedora C3, and loving it, i have every thing working.....apart from the screen saver, i have an ati 9800 pro that i have managed to get working + playing QuakeIII nicely. But when ever i 'Lock' my desktop, or the screen saver runs when i try and enter the password the whole system locks up, and the only thing that i can do is hit the restart button on my pc. some times the screen saver will exit fine but about 90% of the times it just locks...please help!!! i have very untrustworthy flat mates.

thaks.

Don't know how to fix your problem, but rather than reboot, try ctrl-alt-backspace. One day... after rebooting during an active session.... you're going to be sorry.

cheers for the reply, i tried the alt+ctrl+backspace, but to no luck,
i dont know if this helps but if im playing music when the screen saver runs and crashes, it plays the last second of the song over, and over (jumping) so it shows that its locking up i think.
is the screen saver making a system call or something that causes an error? ive tried it in gnome and kde and they both crash.

cheers

Well, in cases like this you have to experiment. Try using a plain generic xorg.conf, just plain generic drivers. Don't have any apps running. Basically, start simple and see where the problem is. Problem may not be in your box, Linux, or the desktop, but in a game or other app. Just don't know....

After booting check dmesg for anything unusual. Then check the Xorg log, and other logs before you lock the screen, and after you come back from a crash. There may be a hint there.

You could also boot into a command prompt and use startx. This will bypass the gdm or xdm or kdm. That may tell of something.

If nothing else works, boot into the command prompt, startx. Then logout of your desktop, then log out of the command prompt. Not what you wanted, but would work until you get the problem resolved. Myself... I don't boot into GUI.

"IF" you could ssh into your box, you could check logs, top, and other processes for the problem.

erm ive had a look at dmesg and xorg and they seem alright, and im pretty sure that you dont want to see 'em all!
does dmesg print just what buffered from kernel? im not sure what it means by kernel ring buffer, or am i just being stupid?!
i have tried the new kernel 2.10.XX but that seems to kill my ati drivers all together.

is there any other programs that i can use to lock the screen? that you know of?

You can look at;
http://www.tux.org/~bagleyd/xlockmore.html
or google: X window screen lock.

Can't say it will work since you're adding another layer on top of what you have. It seems the problem is not with gnome or kde, but something underneath.

Did you try generic generic drivers in xorg.conf?

ah, ha! cracked it nice one mate!!! i think it is my ati drivers, i changed it to a 2d screen saver and now i dont have any problems, i feel like a total nOOber! why didnt i try that in the first place? nevermind! i dont understand why it plays 3d apps fine but not the screen saver? weird,

thanks for your help anyway!!!!

ATI's linux support has been rather sucky since i began using an ATI radeon hd 4200 on-board vga card. i'm using fglrx 10.10 and have been having a similar issue. anytime my session is locked, e.g. after idle or on switching a user, the local terminal becomes unresponsive when trying to unlock the session. however, i can ssh into the box and issue a killall -9 X and this seems to restore it to a useable state, though it's rather inconvienient. when using a 2d screensaver as mentioned above the problem is not apparent. Wouldn't surprise me if this was a bug with fglrx.