weird blank screen
 

Occasionally when running Fedora the screen will go blank except for the mouse which cannot move past the vertical and horizontal center of the screen but can move off the screen and appear on the other side both horizontally and vertically. There seems to be no way to get out of it other than to hold the power button until it turns off. I -think- it may be related to plugging into the charger. What the heck is going on?!?
Dell Insipiron 1501
vid: Ati something or other--Ill find it if you need it.
Thanks, please help

PS. How do I keep the mouse from going back pages when I move my finger along the bottom of the pad?

do you have the i8kutils installed for Dell laptops ?

Are you running the oss ati driver or the proprietary fglrx driver for your video ?

Is that a synaptics touchpad on the laptop ? http://jmatrix.net/dao/case/case.jsp...0FF83EBB70-49E

A) how do I find out?
B) What? I named my account that for a reason :) its the same as the one Fedora picked.
C)Yes
Sorry I can't give you much info, anything more specific? (what exactly do you mean by oss/proprietary drivers)
Thanks

By the way, where might i find the about:config file specified in that article you posted?

A. Query your package manager.. I don't use fedora so I'm not sure how, maybe "yum info i8kutils" Check man yum or man rpm for info on how to use your package management system..

B. er... what ? I'm not sure what you are responding to here...

C. post the output of this command... cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep Driver

just type about:config where you would normally type a website address in firefox...

A) I tried and it gave me a bunch of errors saying that its not there so I assume I don't have it
man yum:
yum(8) yum(8)

NAME
yum - Yellowdog Updater Modified

SYNOPSIS
yum [options] [command] [package ...]

DESCRIPTION
yum is an interactive, automated update program which can be used for
maintaining systems using rpm

command is one of:
* install package1 [package2] [...]
* update [package1] [package2] [...]
* check-update
* upgrade [package1] [package2] [...]
* remove | erase package1 [package2] [...]
* list [...]
* info [...]
* provides | whatprovides feature1 [feature2] [...]
* clean [ packages | headers | metadata | dbcache | all ]
* makecache
:
man rpm:
RPM(8) Red Hat Linux RPM(8)

NAME
rpm - RPM Package Manager

SYNOPSIS
QUERYING AND VERIFYING PACKAGES:
rpm {-q|--query} [select-options] [query-options]

rpm {-V|--verify} [select-options] [verify-options]

rpm --import PUBKEY ...

rpm {-K|--checksig} [--nosignature] [--nodigest]
PACKAGE_FILE ...

INSTALLING, UPGRADING, AND REMOVING PACKAGES:
rpm {-i|--install} [install-options] PACKAGE_FILE ...

rpm {-U|--upgrade} [install-options] PACKAGE_FILE ...

rpm {-F|--freshen} [install-options] PACKAGE_FILE ...

:



B)The ati driver

C)[root@localhost firmware]# cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep Driver
Driver "kbd"
Driver "synaptics"
Driver "radeon"

OK so you are using the open source radeon driver for your laptop video..

I would suggest installing the fglrx proprietary driver (if they support your graphics card) and seeing if that will make a difference.

lspci should provide a list of hardware in your machine including the graphics controller. Check the info about ATI's drivers to see if yours is supported.

I don't have any ATI graphics cards so I can't steer you much farther on this project..

http://ati.amd.com/products/catalyst/linux.html

http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Main_Page

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showth...3&page=1&pp=10

Thank you thank you thank you
So its my driver that is causing this problem.