screen blacks out, system still running: no messages?

[Bram Kuijper]

Hi all,

I've never encountered any problems with my TFT-screen before, but 
today, while working on my Ubuntu Feisty box on an IBM thinkpad R50e, 
the screen suddenly blacked out, while the system kept running. There 
was no chance of getting into any other terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT 
+ F2,3,4. After a restart everything went fine, but I want to prevent me 
and other users from this event reoccurring (I lost quite some work due 
to this problem).

How can I find out where things went wrong? In /var/log/dmesg, messages, 
kern.log or Xorg.log I've found nothing peculiar that could give me a 
clue what has happened. Where should I look in this case? Or is there no 
way of knowing this, without installing everything with debug messages on?

cheers,
Bram