[ubuntu-uk] screensaver freezing

[David King]

I have just bought a Dell Inspiron 1525 with Ubuntu. It is actually for 
my girlfriend, her old laptop is about to stop working. It had Windows 
XP Pro, but I also installed Ubuntu 7.10 on a separate partition, 
however, that stopped working and she carried on with XP. I offered to 
buy her a new laptop, and she agreed to have it with Ubuntu, anything 
other than Vista.

Well, so far the laptop is working okay, except that when the 
screensaver is running, and I press a key to kill the screensaver, the 
whole thing just freezes. The screensaver image is frozen, and no key 
presses do anything. I have to press the power button to reset the 
laptop and reboot.

The screensaver is Helios. Running Ubuntu 8.04.1, with Gnome, standard 
Dell install with a few extra software programs, but no major changes to 
the system. I have updated Ubuntu online with the latest updates for 8.04.

I have changed to a different screensaver (SlideScreen) to stop the 
problem in case it is Helios. Also I changed the setting for Power 
Management to not switch off the screen (it was previously set to switch 
off after 40 minutes). I wonder if perhaps the more fancy screensavers 
are just too much for whatever graphics hardware is in the laptop?

David King