On Friday 29 April 2011 22:43:29 StarLion wrote: > Hallo all. Got a bit of a puzzler for you to... well, puzzle over. > Finally gave in and put Arch on me new(er) laptop, set myself up a KDE > desktop, personalise, etc... the usual post-install kind of things. > Now, I've often got downloads I leave going overnight while I sleep, > which wouldn't be a problem... except at some point in the night the > entire system just locks up. By the time I open the lid in the > morning, the laptop presents me with a black screen and is totally > unresponsive. > Yet if I leave it on a console without X running, it doesn't happen. > Of course, this doesn't really help much, since the download app I use > is a graphic app without a CLI backend, inconveniently. > I've thought to check the logfiles, except even the 'everything.log' > just shows a line with '--MARK--' on it, and then nothing else until > syslog-ng starts up on the next boot up. > Without anything logged to trace it from, I'm at a complete loss here. > I've tried disabling pretty much all of KDE's power management in case > it happened to be that, but no luck. > > Searching about the internet suggested two problem possibilities, > namely VLC (which apparently somehow causes KDE to experience issues > just by having it installed...) and cron, though there's nothing cron > is running except three daily jobs - logrotate, man-db and shadow > respectively, none of which would seem to me to be the cause. > > Anyone got any ideas to lend a hand here? >
The first thing I would suggest is when you have a problem like this and you want help in resolving the issue you need to let us know what distro and version you are using, what the spec of the machine particularly in this case the video subsystem on the laptop, what make video is it, Intel, ATI or Nvidia, what drivers are you using etc. You can test your laptop memory quite simply as many distro come with memory test software on the boot dvd\cd. Just boot from the dvd\cd and select the test memory option. I would let this do several test which normally takes upto a couple of hours each test. Alternatively goto http://www.memtest.org/#downiso And download an ISO image and then burn the ISO image to dvd\cd and then insert the dvd\cd and run the memory tests. >From what you have said I would suspect the screen saver. Try disabling the screen saver and leave the lid of the laptop open overnight and see if you get the lock up in the morning. If you have no lockup then trying selecting a different screensaver, try a non GL screensaver. Tim -- Next meeting: Blandford Forum, Wednesday 2011-05-04 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
