Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 120817
Screen blanks at random
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:40 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040207 Firefox/0.8 Description of problem: When I am in X windows and using KDE, sometimes the screen completely blanks all of a sudden. But when I move my mouse, the screen comes back. It resembles the monitor going into a blank screensaver but the difference is that I am actively working in it so the screensaver shouldn't activate. This doesn't happen all the time but at random. However, it has happened quite a few times. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Couldn't Reproduce Steps to Reproduce: 1. Just doing something in KDE 2. 3. Additional info: I have a feeling that it is due to Fedora Core 2 Tests moving to X.Org's version of X windows there is some quirk.
Happens to me as well, using Gnome on ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 M9, very much resembles screensaver kicking in at a random interval regardless of whether one is typing or not. Interestingly, mouse move wakes the screen, while keyboard clicking does not.
I encounter exactly the same problem. My screen blanks randomly and quite often (every 10 min or so) even when i'm typing or moving mouse. I mention that my graphic card is a radeon 9600 (and is recognized as a generic vesa card by the OS), and i have power management enabled ('standy after 20 min') Additionnaly, the blanks seems to last from one half to a few seconds.
PS : I am using Fedora Core 2 (not test2).
I'm using FC2 now and I had one instance of this screen blank. I should add that when it happens and I leave it, the monitor goes into standby mode. My video card is an Nvidia GeForce 2 and I'm using the nvidia linux drivers. I have FC2 on my laptop which has an ATI Radeon 7500 Mobility and I've never had this problem before. Hope this helps.
I have this problem with FC2. DPMS activates after 30 minutes, and again 10 minutes later, even though I'm using the computer. The monitor goes into standby if I let it, so it's definitely DPMS not a screensaver.
I was experiencing this problem for the longest time, ready to pull my hair out. I -think- I've found a workaround. I've gone for three days with no screen blanking. I have a P4C 2.8GHz, on an i865PE chipset, Shuttle AB60N mobo and Matrox Millennium G550. I am running Fedora Core 2. Here is what I tried: I disabled hyperthreading and APIC in the BIOS and then disabled the irqbalance daemon on FC2. Note that APIC and ACPI are not the same thing- that confused me for a while. ACPI is "Advanced Configuration and Power Interface" and cannot be disabled in my Award BIOS, just minimally configured. APIC is "Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller". Not only are the acroynyms similar, but I thought for the longest time that this was a power management issue (APCI). But it was so random, that got me thinking that interrupt handling on my hyperthreaded system might be at the root of the screen blanking.
I also found a work-around for this problem. In the ServerLayout section I added: Option "StandbyTime" "30" Option "SuspendTime" "0" Option "OffTime" "0" This is probably preferable to disabling hyperthreading, although it doesn't help in pinpointing the problem. The bug seems to lie in x.org. See: http://freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=792
Tracking issue in the X.Org bug tracker at freedesktop.org. Please do any followups in the X.Org bug report, so we can track this issue in one place. Thanks guys.
Thank you Mike. I know this report is closed, and I'll follow it over at freedesktop.org. Just updating my earlier post to report that the screen blanking still plagues me on Fedora Core 3 with the new x.org 6.8.1. I had switched for a while to Ubuntu Linux with a patched XFreex86 4.3.0 and had no blanking problems in two month's of use. X.org's promise of better rendering, translucent windows, drop shadows and other cool features mean little when my PC monitor is narcoleptic. I experienced the same bug on Mandrake 10.1 and SUSE 9.1. I'll reinstall Ubuntu and follow the bug process over at freedesktop.org (if I can get their bugtracker to come up). Hopefully, the community can get this longstanding bug licked.