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
>> [log in to unmask]" target="_blank">http:[log in to unmask]
> 
> 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
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