screen blacks out, system still running: no messages?

[Paul Kaplan]

I had a similar problem on a T41 running Edgy.  It happened only after I 
installed beryl and had to play around w/ the video drivers to get it 
working.  Whatever the root cause, it had all sorts of bad consequences 
including unable to return to screen :0 after going to a different virtual 
terminal, all sorts of XScreensaver crashes, and even what appears to be a 
hardware problem whereby if I picked up the machine in a certain way, the 
screen would go blank.  I did a quick scan of the system log, but nothing 
struck me as unusual.

It is interesting however that the problem only occurred on a 3-yr old machine 
w/ and ati card and not on a 1-yr old T43 with an intel 915 card, which sort 
of got me thinking that it was a driver problem.  After installing Feisty 
from scratch the problem vanished so I presume something about setting up 
beryl and changing drivers screwed me and I haven't investigated further.  

You might try booting to the live CD and checking the video config inlcuding 
drivers and xorg.conf to see if there's something different about a "good" 
setup and your current setup.

Paul

On Monday 30 April 2007 5:14:36 am Bram Kuijper wrote:
> 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