Jon Peatfield wrote:
On Tue, 10 Jul 2007, Vrijaldenhoven, Serge wrote:
Hi,
I installed SL5 on a Latitude C-400. When I switch from GUI to a
virtual terminal (e.g. Ctrl-Alt-F2) and then back to GUI (Ctrl-Alt-F7)
my system completely locks up: screen gets black and no keystrike has
any effect. The only thing I can do then, is reboot. Is anybody
experiencing the same problem and is there a solution for this?
Oddly enough we have a machine where quite the oposite applies, ie one
*must* change vt to avoid problems...
In our case the problem is with the driver for the onboard Intel 845
graphics -- if the X server has powered the monitor down (DPMS) when one
restarts it (with either gdm-restart or gdm-safe-restart), it leaves the
video card in a confused state and you never get any output. Using chvt
to switch vt's has the side-effect of getting the X server to wake up
the monitor and then a restart is ok.
I've never liked Intel onboard graphics chipsets and this just further
makes me glad we have so few machines using them...
Possibly related?:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/fedora/+source/beryl-core/+bug/107034
http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg379749.html
Those appear to be describing problems with 'beryl' or 'Desktop Effects'
(whatever those are). If you have such things enabled does turning them
off help?
What graphics hardware does your C400 have? Which xorg driver is being
used? Can you check if the system is still accessible over a network
when it seems to have frozen at the console?
We have some machines with particular ATI chipsets which older versions
of X radeon driver dislike and freeze the system solid when some
operations happen. Our problems *seem* to be fixed in the xorg in SL5
but in earlier systems (XFree86 in SL3 and xorg in SL4) we had to use
the SVGA driver to avoid the lock-ups.
I agree on Intel graphics. I had a Dell GX270 on which I installed RHEL5
Beta{WS,SERVER}, SLES10, OpenSUSE10 and (I think) Debian. Oh, Fedora
Core 6 too. None had the graphics "just work," and I didn't really get
it working properly.
FC6 was completely unacceptable with a graphics display reminiscent of
my EGA screen's RAM being overwritten back in Good Old DOS on TTY[1-12]
(I push X to tty13). This happened after using X.
Mostly, "modprobe intelfb" and some more magic got a working, acceptable
framebuffer virtual console, but it was always a bit rough.
That's running Debian and pretending to be a server (no X) at school now
and I have an IBM ThinkCentre. Also intel graphics, but this one seems
to behave a little better - maybe practice makes perfect, maybe IBM does
it better than Dell.
Your problem may be similar to what I experienced with FC6: in my case I
got a bad display, in yours it seems to freeze,
While you say, "no keystrike has any effect," you don't explicitly
mention those keys, such as num-lock, that toggle lights.
If this is a work machine, I'd try to negotiate a swap for something
that does work;-) I've had other problems like yours, I don't recall
actually fixing any of them;-(
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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