I'm trying to select the "Random" screen saver in the KDE control center, but it just comes up as a blank screen both in the preview and when it turns on. Has anyone else had this problem? How might I fix this?

I have this exact same problem, but never got motivated enough to investigate it. Anyone else have the issue?

This problem can be in part the video setup.

Quite a few of the screensavers use 3D graphics effects and you will need a 3D capable video driver set for your video card for Linux in good working order to get random to work but you will find some of the individual screensavers use 2D and will work. Set up an indidividual screensaver, and if 3D drivers are present and it is not a 2D one then you will find that if you do not have 3D drivers present the test panel will show only black if the drivers that come with the free version of Linux Mandrake are all that is running.

nVidia has the best drivers for 3D right now and I got random to work on mine so that it behaves and shows screensaver in test mode instead of the black screen for the screensavers that are 3D by getting the drivers that came with my Linux Mandrake PowerPack for 9.1 working very well. In the case of the PowerPack the nVidia drivers for 3D were included.

Here is why this needs to be true:

Mandrake uses only things that can released to the GPL in its free distribution. nVidia wants it this way, it has a proprietory interest in retaining rights to its 3D driver code and has its own license. The Mandrake folks obtained the rights to provide an installer that would install the Mandrake distribution and install the nVidia package from nVidia and did not license the nVidia part in such a way as to violate nVidia's rights, so since the free distribution is GPL with minor exceptions and since nVidia wants you to know their driver code is their property licensed to you, I would say that you would do best get the nVidia drivers free from nVidia's site, read the license agreement before download and the package readme(print the readme and the instructions from nVidia on how to install also) before installing anything and then let the package pretty much install itself.

I have found that there is a blank screen screensaver that random can call, but it runs about 10% of the time max. You can also have your computer's BIOS set to set to a blank screen after a certain time, and that is how I do it-- screensaver runs for a time of 30 min or so, the computer then powers down the screen display and in my case also goes to sleep an hour later pretty much as far as video only goes. I do not have my computer set to fully suspend as I also run the Folding@Home client for Linux and it likes to stay folding and will do so without video.

This is on a P4 2.26 GHz machine with 1 Gig of DDR266 RAM running the Enterprise kernel, but the nVidia drivers actually have worked for more than a year very well on many cards with nVidia chips on them adn on many computers. I actually have running right now the kernel the Win4Lin installer built from my Win4Lin 5.0 install run and it is a Win4Lin self-compiled kernel which is very stable using KDE 3.1. Card is an nVidia chip card that is not a GFX or GF4 card(earlier).

Getting nVidia to run is much easier than getting the ATI driver sets for 3D to run ATM (at the moment).

I am not a Mandrake dev or employee and have only used Mandrake for 2+ years right now and came as a Windows-->Linux migrator newbie who first used and programmed computers in 1969 (well before PCs) and that use was a student in a math department advanced class using a cast-off from the Quaker Oats HQ which was across the road at the time up in norhern Illinois. I have worked with and can support Windows 3.0 and up and DOS 3.1 and up and thus was kinda skewed looking at Unix-like commands and software structures.

I like Linux a lot. I am more a computer generalist who is good enough to build and support both worlds and is generally tired of Microsoft taking 5 years to acknowledge bugs that they said 5 years ago were features planned that way than I am a programmer per se.

I am a configurator and integrator specialist who also is a certified computer tech and repair and troubleshoot computers for a living, and having been in the windows world since the days of 3.1(an DOS before that) also fought viruses starting back in the days when McAfee kenw less than 1,000 viruses. This is not a boast, this is fact, and shown to show why I can come out of the blue with good answers in only some areas and mostly do not post code fixes at detail level in answers.

John C. Danielson, II (aka jdii1215)

hmmmm... I'm not sure that this is the problem. I already have the driver for my nVidia card installed (from nVidia site). 3D graphics seem to work fine. For example, Tux Racer works. I *didn't* have the driver installed for this when I was running Slackware, but the Random screen saver worked fine without needing any configuration or tweeking. The other screen savers that Mandrake packaged with 9.1 appear to work fine.

Is there something I'm missing?

Random will use any screensaver installed. Possibly one is corrupt, but then it should work sometimes and in others just give a blank screen and if you get a corrupt one than you would possibly have a video lock until you have rebooted if you have a complete run until the machine sleeps sometimes and not others or a semi-random lockup in screensaver run. I use boring screensavers, but also know they are not needed at all for modern monitors and are mostly clues for folks that system is on these days.

Real old monitors would burn in because they used phosphors that were relatively warm compared to what was next to them adn would burn an inverted image inbto that layer of the display sandwich, but modern monitors use cooler reactions for display and have materials that are more durable in their sandwich of materials inside the outer glass screen front (front outer case of tube of CRT).

The other half of the video driver pairs is the monitor settings, and if a monitor is told to use refresh rates out of its bounds it will lock and sometimes when they go in bounds will mode switch and be ok. So let's see, question time...

First, does the monitor go dark after a certain time???

Second, does this happen at same time mostly, from time the screensaver starts???

Does screensaver run at all, or does the screen just go blank despite testing the screensavers one by one and having them work??

What desktop and version (and if Tex did the archives he likes lack of screensaver typically and might not have spent a lot of time on them)???

It is possible to set a screensaver to start and have the BIOS turn screen off exactly same wait time and even to have machine set to fully sleep at same time as screensavers. If all screensavers TEST ok, but the monitor goes to sleep it could well be a BIOS setting of CMOS and that will override any operating system. If CMOS\Clock battery dies, BIOS will set settigns to default every time computer is booted until battery is replaced or if a Dallas clock chip cell it needs about a week of continuous run to trickle charge right.

I had fun with sleeping on my Barton 2500 box, sysncing the power settings in BIOS setup for Windows 98SE so it would suspend and wake up right was an interesting 5 hour exercise as I had to let it sleep several times to get things right-- and Linux likes PM different than Windows so that box uses certain economical Windows things that are like old shoes to me (as far as programs they are hyper familiar and behave in 98SE) and the online box is Linux 90% of the time and BSD the rest and I am on it now.

All these things can affect screensaver hangs or seeming abends of the screensaver. But my P4 and my Barton box CAN run Mandrake with random screensaver mode working fine.



What desktop and version is this in???

I have sort of a different (but yet strangely similar) issue maybe someone can shed some light on. I have SuSE 8.2 Pro installed on a Dell Inspiron 8200 (KDE desktop) with the nVIDIA card (GEForce, I believe). Anyway, I downloaded the drivers from nVIDIA, went through the installation process and enabled the 3D acceleration. All works great. I can view 2D or 3D or GL screensavers without any problems.

The problem occurs after the screensaver has kicked on. 9 times out of 10 the screensaver will kick on correctly and when I move the mouse or touch a key, the screensaver will exit and my desktop will return correctly. Occasionally, though, I've noticed that I will come back to the computer and the screen will just be dark (even though I've selected a specific screensaver -- not random, so no chance of "Blank Screen" being selected) and when I try to bring the desktop back up the resulting screen looks like the vhold is ALL of out whack. It is impossible to read the screen as it consists of nothing but horizontal lines, sort of like the top of the screen is anchored, but the rest of the image is continuously pushed to the side.

I end up having to reboot the laptop and then things are fine.

My solution for the moment is to not use a screensaver, but as Linux has quick a few betters ones than Windows did, I'd like to solve this problem if I can.

Thanks in advance!

I realize that my previous post was for the SuSE distro and this is a Mandrake distro group ... if this isn't the right place for me to post this, please let me know where I should post this question.

Thanks!

I had the same problem with an integrated GeForce 2 chip and Mandrake 9.1 on my laptop (I'd guess your's is the same, they seem pretty popular for laptops).

I did send Nvidia a few emails on the matter, but they didn't bother to reply, just out of curiosity, does anyone know what causes this?

I have found that many times this is a Laptop Power Management settings versus Linux issue. what can happen is that the laptop is told to come back up in Linux after a wakeup (which is perhaps involved here if the Linux is using APMd and the Laptop is trying to use ACPI or more modern forms of PM).

The laptop is using a default mode to bring the screen back up and apparently Linux does not like teh vertical refresh rate or the laptop is using a different refresh rate from which Linux's monitor tables are set at and the rate Linux used before sleep is one that the Laptop could use.

You can try the following, and I woudl try this with the laptop connected to a wall outlet:

Turn off all PM you can in the Dell BIOS setup, and set it to default to the LCD built-in screen which is its default. Reboot the machine and see if you can replicate the issue after also checking to make sure that is you can PNP O\S option in the PNP area of the BIOS setup says "NO". The other thing is that it is quite possible you have a dual-video out laptop, and if so try it with a monitor, CRT type, plugged in if teh first try as above fails. I would write down and new you try for any changed settings, as you can invalidate the Linux setup or the BIOS video playing with PM after a wakeup, and that is what we need to test if no poweroff in PM in BIOS setup does not work or is unavailable.

If a SuSE user who knows how to manually set up video as to adapter and monitor is in the house I would like to hear from them in this thread about how-to.

jdii1215 --

Good thoughts ... now that you mention it, I just recently managed to figure out how to use only APM and not ACPI since the 2.4 kernel does not yet fully implement ACPI (at least that is what I've read). I wanted to be able to monitor my battery strength while unplugged from the wall (since it is a laptop, after all ). Come to think of it, this problem (at least for me) started occuring after switching from ACPI to APM. I will run through some tests to make sure, but I am betting you may be on to something.

Look atmy reply just below your post to Tino27. Mandrake is working on Power Management as part of 9.2 and has had limited success as the issues there are also being worked on by the Linux kernel team. Stock answer is to use Linux on hardware hookup and check refresh rates being used versus what the display panel can accept or on dual video laptops to see if waking up with a monitor attached works and LCD screen is invalid. Since laptops in energy conservation mode can sleep in 20 min of non-use these days, and since they determine defaults in BIOS as to video, it is possble what you have is a Linux video mode versus laptop default at wakeup or a laptop responding to a laptop wakeup signal from Linux that it misunderstands and is sending a video rate the screen cannot display but the out-port to a monitor will display. If you leave it plugged in to outlet power and let it sleep with a montior hooked up and then let it suspend or hibernate you can see if you get video out of monitor and if so then the wrong reference table is being used for your LCD display.

Ok, also note that if you get into the services listing in your SuSE admin mgt you might see if both ACPI and APM are running. If so, they are not intercompatible right now. I use apmd here for my desktop and had to play with PM toget things to about the PM state 98SE supports to get it to work. I have working the latest driver archive from nVidia on KDE 3.1 ATM, adn my desktop wakes up. If you want ideas to try I can dig into my BIOS settings which have bneen stable PM wise for a couple months and tell you what standards I have them set to. Note that Linux is set to start ACPI control daemons at boot if yuo installed with the PM set to ACPI, adn you might have to remove the calls to start it, soif you did not do so and it set up APM you might have BOTH running. Mandrake does this weirdly, uses a LOT of custom scripts in Perl tohook things into lower layer files and the lower layer files are not all in LSB places that it uses so MY milage will vary greatly from yours.

I know also that the default LCD driver settings do not match many current displays on laptops for the time frame from 1+ years ago to present, and those were built from limited data on laptops from 3-4 years ago typically based on data of what DOES work.

Lots of good things to try...

I am definitely sure that at least in my case (I don't know about rorymc) that only APM is running as I added the following to the menu.lst file to the appropriate GRUB menu selection (which is my default Linux start-up selection)

... apm=on acpi=off ...

Also, I watched the initial loading scripts as Linux is first booting to indeed verify that APM overrode ACPI (well not override it exactly, but APM loaded and ACPI didn't). I will try the external monitor trick to see if that might shed some light.

As the laptop is less than 1 year old, it may very well fall into the category of driver settings you described above.

Happy you have use for some of the ideas, and I would like to see what the fix is in your case here, as it might help others in the same kinds of issues.

John.