I'm running Linux mdk 9.2 on a gateway 310X. Now, whenever I leave my machine idle for extended periods of time (like 4+ hours), I return to find that the monitor is blank (though it's not in power saving mode) and moving the mouse or keyboard does not bring the screen back. I have to reboot (ctrl-alt-del) and then it shows the shutdown process (where it fails to shutdown the saslauth daemon) and reboots. At first, I thought that apm was suspending the machine and messing it up (apm has been known to do that, I understand), so I got rid of it, but the problem persisted. I looked at /var/log/security and saw that it ran "msec" a lot when idle so I disabled that as well. The problem still persists.



Can anybody tell me which log files I should see to diagnose what's happening. Once I know what's causing this, I can try to fix it.



Thanks in advance,

AR

Uhm, this may be of _no_ help, but it sounds a little like a problem my husband's computer has. He's got an AMD Athlon 1700 or so (I can't remember) on a Soyo KT-333 Dragon Ultra Platinum board, in a Chieftec Dragon midtower case, with an NVidia card. I don't recall all the other particulars, except this one: we live in Arizona. This problem only happens during the summer months...when his office in our house gets warm.

He's installed fans in the case (and keeps them free of dust as much as possible) and has a small "desk fan" blowing at the front of the case. It's "winter" here now (as winter as we get), so he hasn't had the problem for some time. We suspect the video card is getting too warm.

I don't have the faintest idea how to go about testing this, but perhaps this could point you in the right direction?

Good luck!
Anne.

1. Mine is a P4

2. I have ac, and it's peak winter here in Texas

3. My video card is not an NVidia, it's older. Besides, this MUST be OS related, not hardware related, as I have a dual boot with wimpdoze and this does not happen there.