Hey,

I'm not sure if this is a problem with Gnome or Ubuntu. At any random time (seemingly, no consistency) my monitor goes black and just sits there. I can hit ctrl+alt+F2 (I believe that gets to the console, but NOTHING show) and then hit ctrl+alt+F7 to get back to Gnome and everything is OK. This is really odd, never experienced this before in a year and a half with Linux. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Brandon

*BUMP*

Anyone have any ideas? Maybe this needs to be moved to another section in this forum?

Thanks,

Brandon

...very small earthquakes moving your video cable?

Humorous, but no. Try again.

Thanks,

Brandon

edit: Since installing Fedora 8, the problem has occurred again and I can use the same fix. I'm beginning to think that the video card might be going bad.

You say that this occurs (seemingly) at random?
So there is no common action that you perform each time this happens, e.g. idling, watching movies etc.?
Have you checked all cables and the interior of your computer (i.e. dust, corrosion)? What video driver do you use?

There is some consistency now. It happens when I'm browsing the internet in Firefox. Sometimes when I'm watching videos, sometimes I'm not. It also happens when I'm sitting on the desktop listening to music. This actually happens to appear a little more frequently on Fedora 8. Now sometimes, it just freezes and I can't do anything except move the mouse across the screen. I don't think it's my memory, but I'll run memtest overnight tonight and we'll see what that yields. I'm not using drivers from ATI for my card, but this is what /sbin/lspci had to say about my video card:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200 PRO] (rev 01)
01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200 PRO] (Secondary) (rev 01)

Maybe the linux supplied driver is a little buggy? I mean, I can move my mouse, but I can't do anything. Should I go with ATI's official driver for my card?

Thanks,

Brandon

edit: No visible dust or corrosion. I just blew it out with an air compressor about a week ago, so you could practically eat off of it. All cables are snugly fitted.

2nd edit: This problem has spanned across TWO PC's. The only things that were consistent in each were the video card, vga cable, distribution and monitor. We can rule out the monitor, and I think we can rule out distribution because this has happened on Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10. We're down to hardware or a possible buggy driver I think. It's likely, but I don't think it's a faulty VGA cable. It's relatively new and it just sits there. Hasn't moved in a while. The video card is just as old as the VGA cable, but is subject to general wear/tear. So, I'm down to the video card and driver. Later, I'll try installing the ATI supplied Linux driver. If that doesn't appear to cure my problem, I guess it's new video card. I've been looking for a new excuse to buy one anyway.

Hmm.. yeah, it probably boils down to either the card or the driver, since you say that you cleaned out dust quite recently; overheating (due to dust) would have been a good guess otherwise, since Firefox/videos and sometimes music can put some load on the CPU.
VIA drivers aren't exactly top notch on Linux so that could very well be the problem, but it could just as likely be that the card is overheated or something, so I'm sorry to say that I'm not quite sure on this one..

The card is outdated anyway. It can BARELY run Compiz. You can get decent video cards on clearance from Newegg.com Guess it's about time to pay them a visit and get a new one. Thanks for the help guys.

Regards,

Brandon