If I walk away from my computer for more than a half hour it will not wake up. The neon lights stay on, but it will not respond to keyboard or mouse, just black screen. I must re-boot. I have Ubuntu 9.04.
It does not happen with windows.

Any ideas/suggestions would be appreciated.

"Neon" lights were abandoned in Errr .... the '70's ?

Perhaps you are running on seriously old hardware ?

Some details of your hardware would help us help you.

Meanwhile:

Do you have "Suspend to Disk" enabled? It's buggy at the moment - disable it if it is causing problems.

Check your "Power (saving) Settings", and maybe choose something else. Experiment until you find the settings that suit your use.

I guess I am showing my age. The computer is modern. It has LED lights, not neon.

Dual core processor
4GIG Ram
How do I disable Suspend to Disk

Heh. I was just teasing: I have soldered 90volt neon indicators for computers (not exactly "PCs" in the current sense) before, but it was quite a while ago ...
I am running Kubuntu 8.04, so it's KDE, not gnome, and my distro is a year older than yours, so I think you'll have to search and test things out for yourself (I did try for you, briefly).

But I think it is defaulting to no activity for 10min -> "screensaver", then, later, with no user input, it's going to "Suspend". I think you need to disable this action, because it isn't working properly (and, credit to the developers, it's difficult to get it right, for all the hardware that's out there).

As I said, your distro is newer than mine, but perhaps you now know where to start searching for a solution.

I don't have an icon to control this, but my distro doesn't do this, so perhaps this is not surprising.

Maybe try this: http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-L.../msg01700.html

If / when you find the solution to disabling suspend, please post it here, because one of these days I expect I'll need to upgrade, and I'll want to know how to disable this nonsense.


[Edit:] Otherwise, please start a new thread titled "How to disable suspend /hibernate in gnome?"
You'll get a better response to your question.
[/Edit]
Good luck.

OK, I found the "Suspend" control in KDE:
R-click the battery icon on the panel, Choose "Restore" and you are presented with options for suspend / hibernate / shutdown after periods of inactivity or low-battery conditions.

Gnome must have something similar, you just have to find it.