On Thu, 17 Oct 2013 21:02:13 -0400, Michael J. Barillier wrote: > If I leave my laptop unattended (at a console, not X) and the screen > blanks, pressing a key won't un-blank the terminal. As a test, I ssh'ed > into the laptop and ran: > > # setterm -blank poke >/dev/tty$N > > (as root, for the current/active TTY) which according to the man page > should restore the screen - no response. Also tried chvt but that didn't > work either. Any suggestions on where to look to see why the terminal > won't restore? Is this a kernel config (ACPI?) issue, or an agetty issue?
Very likely kernel or DRM subsystem. I have an T60 Thinkpad with old ATI graphics and since kernel ~3.7.1 (approx.) it won't unblank any more, just as you described. I tested some time ago with an early 3.10.x and it still did not work. Everything works correctly on a second machine without KMS (plain VESA) and a third system with newer Radeon card, so I always attributed it to the stone age hardware and bitrot. There were quite a lot of changes to the Radeon and DRM machinery over the last few kernel releases. In order to prevent this from locking me out I simply turned it off in /etc/local.d/ like this (there might be a canonical way): $cat /etc/local.d/consoleblank.start # don't blank console - bug in 3.7.1 setterm -blank 0 You could try to bisect from 3.7.0 onwards.. :-) cheers -h
