I'm a linux newbie, and I'm running mandrake on a Celeron 333 mHz with 96 mb ram. I installed linux on this machine last spring, and it worked fine. I used it as a secondary box hosting a webpage and a small message board, just to learn how. It worked fine last year. Over the summer, I just stored the box.

I recently tried to boot this machine and ran into a problem. Linux boots fine, but as soon as it displays the login screen, the monitor goes into sleep mode. I've tried a couple of different monitors, so I know it's not a monitor problem. Anybody have any ideas?

I'm relatively new to linux, so try to dumb down your suggestions for me.

Thanks!

the way to stop screen blanking is by tyyping...
setterm -blank 0

another thing that maybe causing this problem is if it was setup to go into gui mode, and there's something wrong with the video settings that causes the monitor to go into sleep mode, in this case you need to boot up in single mode and change /etc/inittab to get it to boot up in non-gui mode.

It seems i can boot in a text interface, but the graphic interface with X-term is what sends the monitor into sleep mode. This makes me think it's a resolution problem or something.

I tried this. It didn't help.


Could you go into more detal on how to do this? I found the inittab file, but i didn't see anything about booting in gui mode... am i just blind?

(edit: fixed the html tags on one of the quotes)

if you can boot into text mode then it's something wrong with the video settings. edit /etc/X11/XF86Config or run xf86config, I'm not sure what could be causing it, but try change it to standard vga.