I think I may have mentioned this above, but it's my wife's desktop system that has the Intel graphics chip-set in it. She is currently running a Fedora 12 system. Yesterday the Fedora people issued several updates, including a minor kernel update.

We immediately (well, about 10 minutes after rebooting) noticed that, whenever the system attempted to save power or start a screen saver, the screen would go black and and the system would be "dead," responding to nothing except a "hard" power-off.

Anyhow, I've now disabled all power saving and screen-saver triggers, and she seems to be able to run with no problem. (By the way, she was running KDE under KDM, so - if this is a "solution" - it's not a GNOME one.)

Just to update everyone on my efforts to fix this issue: I have found none. I tried nearly every fix mentioned in thread, installed several different distros with modern kernels and xorg files -- all end in the same result. They work for a while, but finally crash or boot to a black screen every third or fourth boot. I did have Fedora running reasonably well (a crash on only one out of twenty reboots.) Then, a kernel upgrade during a security update started the whole thing again.

The solution I have found that looks the most promising is to just install a distro that is old enough to predate the new xorg (pre 1.7, I think).

I will try Ubuntu 9.10 as I have been told that this is the last distro that will work with this chipset without having to jump through hoops.

I will let everyone know the results.

Bob

By any chance, would it make a difference by setting "Driver" to "i810" in the "xorg.conf" file ?!
I noticed a line that effect while shutting down the GUI mode in the SystemRescue CD (this GUI mode is started by typing "wizard" at the command-line).
I have also read this suggestion in other threads about this problem of 845G graphics controller on the site.

Regards,

the i810 driver only exists in older distros with older xorgs. That is basically the whole problem.

This is worth a read just to know where you stand

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=ODU3Mg

Bob, thanks a lot!
I'm Zenwalk user. I have old motherboard with 82845g, and my screen always became black when I switched to the terminal or logged out. It was enough to add "i915.modeset=1" to my /etc/lilo.conf and change "vesa" to "intel" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and now works fine.
Again, thanks!