Monitor Works with Older Distros
 

I had been having some problems with my Acer LCD monitor. It would brighten and then go dark. If I turned it off, waited a bit, then turned it back on, it would work for a minute or so. I suspect that it is a failing cap or two. But I managed to turn the brightness down and it worked fine until I upgraded my PCLinuxOS Kde from a 2013 version to a 2014 version.

It will work with PCLinuxOS LXDE 2013.10. But when I upgrade this distro using Synaptic, the problem returns.

Any suggestions?

must be hardware, and failing caps is the most common issue.
and quite easy to repair, if you have used a soldering iron before (i did it, and i don't even have one of those small irons, just a cheap pistol)

I guess it could be some driver issue. Guess it could be in the kernel. Just update one thing at a time and maybe you can find out what is doing it. I'd think kernel or video support is changed. Could be some x org setting or power management or maybe video size or ....


:) The Be Operating System.

Thanks, Ondoho. I used to do a lot of soldering on computers back in the 80s. I was still looking for the easy way out, since the monitor was working fine until I did an upgrade.

And thank you, Jefro. I will try your suggestions, try various video settings. Check the X settings.

Check if they added in KMS to this new kernel.

i did not get that impression from your first post - it's abit contradictory.
you decribe all these problems, then you say that they got worse after an upgrade, but you don't describe how they got worse. that's what i understood.

KMS? I'll check that out.

Ondoho. After I turned the brightness down about six months ago, I had no more problems until I installed the newest version of PCLinuxOS kde 32bit. I recently reinstalled an older version and the screen is working again. Quite puzzling.

Well, it is not your monitor.

What video card do you use? Did you re-installed the video drivers after "upgrading" the operating system?

The video card is NVIDIA GeForce 6100.

I did not install the drivers. I was relying on the kernel to provide. I've tried the PCLinuxOS kde 2014.05 with another monitor and it worked okay.

I am currently using kernel-2.6.38.8-pclos3.bfs, with which the bad monitor works.

Two things.

First, your kernel is ancient. If it works for you, fine, but you might consider upgrading to a newer version of you favorite Linux distribution with a "modern" kernel. The current stable kernel is in the 3.xx series.... 3.14.4, I think, but probably has changed since last time I looked.

Second, while some people only want to use open source, which is fine, they are entitled to their opinions, but the Nvidia drivers are, IMO, worth installing for the best possible performance.
BTW, moving from ATi to Nvidia is one of the best things I've ever done with Linux. It was by accident. My ATi card died, unexpectedly, and the only thing I could find at any of the stores in the area were Nvidia GPU based cards. They just work. You do have to re-install the drivers after each kernel upgrade or upgrade of xorg, but it is a snap as compared to the ATi drivers. As I said, one of the best things I've done.

Their drivers can be found at,

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Good luck.

It may be possible to update video driver. Also may have to disable KMS. I suspect the newer kernel has Kernel Mode Settings. It was supposed to be a way to set video at boot basically so that screen can follow loaders and splash screens up to desktop.