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Please bear with me as i'm not sure where the source of the problem is, so i'll just describe what i observed...
i'm running Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 32-bit on
- AMD X2 6000+ Dual Core
- Asus M2A-MVP
- Asus 9500GT 512 MB
- 4 GB RAM
Recently i start to have this problem (i.e. a week ago it did not occur at all).
i would put my desktop into screen lock (and hence the screensaver comes on) and leave the house for a few hours.
When i come back, the screen will be blank, with no input going to the monitor (i.e. the monitor is similar to the state where if i turn it on without turning the CPU on). The power LED on the CPU would still be on though. However, nothing i do with the keyboard or mouse would "wake" it, and i would have to force it to turn off (by holding the power button) and turning it on again.
i'm not using power management settings (i.e. put computer to sleep and put display to sleep both at "never").
The screensaver i have running is "ColorSaver". Sometimes i'll have Firefox running (when screen lock and i leave the house), sometimes i don't. Apart from these, i also have Firestarter and Google Gadgets running.
As mentioned, these are just observations, i can't post specific information because i'm not even sure where to start looking, so kindly let me know what additional information to post that can help. Would also appreciate, if anyone has faced similar issues recently, to let me know.
A few questions: Does this box have Windows on it too? If so, does the problem occur there too? What happens if you do enable the power saving options - does it still go into eternal sleep? Does the problem still occur if you use the "blank screen" screensaver instead of a graphical one? BTW, the box itself isn't frozen when this happens, right? Can you log in remotely, for example?
Does this box have Windows on it too? If so, does the problem occur there too?
Yes i have Windows on another partition, but i hardly used it (and even when i do, it was never left lying around like i did with Ubuntu), so i have never encountered this there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by win32sux
What happens if you do enable the power saving options - does it still go into eternal sleep?
i have never tried this, but just out of curiousitiy, why do you think this relevant? i mean, i would have thought that if there was a problem with power management (ACPI?), it would be occurring if i enabled it, and not if it's disabled.
Quote:
Originally Posted by win32sux
Does the problem still occur if you use the "blank screen" screensaver instead of a graphical one?
Good point, i would try this out the next time i leave the desktop idle.
Quote:
Originally Posted by win32sux
BTW, the box itself isn't frozen when this happens, right? Can you log in remotely, for example?
Have never tried this as well, i will try it out the next time i face this issue, and report back.
Does the problem still occur if you use the "blank screen" screensaver instead of a graphical one?
Preliminary findings seem to suggest that if i use a "blank screen" screensaver it would be ok. i just left it in that state for the past 6 hours, and it's still awake after that. But it could be pure good luck, i will repeat this a couple more times and report back.
Quote:
Originally Posted by win32sux
BTW, the box itself isn't frozen when this happens, right? Can you log in remotely, for example?
Seems like the box IS frozen. After it happened, i could not SSH in. Also, i checked out the status of on my router, and the box is no longer actively connected to it.
I've been having the same problem on a Toshiba laptop (uses Intel 950GMA for video) running Slackware. The problem is starting to seem like a bug somewhere in X/Mesa, as I'm able to get around the problem by using a non-OpenGL screensaver. I don't know about the lock-up problem you're having, the logs on my computer suggest everything else is fine until I have to hard reset the entire computer, so your problem could be elsewhere....too...
Last edited by tmerriam; 12-21-2008 at 11:42 AM.
Reason: grammar
Hi, after a few more tries, i can confirm that the screensaver is the one that (maybe indirectly) causes the problem. Any logs that i should be looking at? Any advice/suggestion please?
tmerriam: yes, it does seem to be similar to what you described. Not sure if it's a bug, or something i configured incorrectly...
I currently use the "Blank screen" screensaver. I used to use the matrix one and the one with the bubbles, but I would return to a frozen box sometimes. There was nothing logged in my case, presumably because the freeze was too sudden. I kinda miss having a nice screensaver, but having a box that doesn't freeze is more important to me.
Using a blank screen screensaver is not a problem. But i'm concerned that it may be a bigger problem underlying (OpenGL, X, graphics card driver, etc).
win32sux: Are you using an nVidia based card as well?
edwin11, could it be that your cpu is overheated and the computer turns off by itself ? My theory is that some screensavers are very graphic intensive and the good graphic cards such as nvidia can generate too much heat (umm... may be those onboard intel graphic controller might be a way to go then if I am not a gamer).
I don't know about others, but it seems to me that most linux distros cannot handle the power management well, so probably it is best to turn off the power saving scheme such sleeping mode. Can some experts share their thoughts ?
I reinstalled opensuse10.3 on my laptop again to see if it goes to external sleep after a while, but so far I have not be able to reproduce the external sleep I observed in the earlier installation of opensuse10.3.. May be in the second installation, I didn't install all packages where one of them may trigger the external sleep problem.
However, I will keep this issue in mind. I have lost faith in keeping faithful to one distro but to keep distro-hopping until I don't have all the weird issues.. Time to learn multiboot and get a large disk space to survive in the challenging linux world..
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Blank Screen After Screen Lock / Screensaver
