From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 Description of problem: Our company has recently purchased two Dell Latitude C640 laptops. (model PP01L) The laptops use an ATI Radion Mobility 7500 display adaptor. (32mb) They have RH9 installed and are up2date. (Dual boot Win XP) When these units go to powersave, the screen is unreadable when they wake up. It happens on both units, so is not a hardware problem. I can't induce the fault when they are operating on Win XP, which points to a Linux X-server problem. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Run laptop on battery 2. After it goes into powersave, restart 3. Display unreadable (tearing) Actual Results: Unreadable display. Resetting X (ctrl-alt-backspace) doesnt help. Have to reboot the machine. The keyboard still works. Expected Results: Should have a readable display. Additional info: Nothing I can think of.
Might be a good idea to check your BIOS vendor's web site to see if there are any BIOS updates/issues that they may know of already and maybe even fixed them already. And I know there are some Dell folks out there are some linux mailing lists, might even contact Dell themselves to see to make sure there are no BIOS bugs they know of that exists on those machines. This is not to get Mike out of trying to say it isn't an X bug or anything like that, just covering all bases *just in case* type of thing.
Does it help when you remove the comment sign from the #CHANGEVT="7" line in /etc/sysconfig/apmd ?
Created attachment 93070 [details] startup log Startup log
Created attachment 93072 [details] output of lsmod command As requested
Created attachment 93073 [details] var/log/messages file
I experienced a similar problem with a Red Hat Linux 9 installation on a Dell Latitude C840 at work. During installation of Red Hat Linux 9 - at the point where it asked for CD-2 - the laptop went into power safe mode (we had it install Red Hat Linux 9 and walked away). Upon returning and waking up the laptop to enter CD-2, the screen was only 'half-visible', which made finishing the installation rather difficult. We did manage it, though.
Since this bugzilla report was filed, there have been several major updates to the X Window System, which may resolve this issue. Users who have experienced this problem are encouraged to upgrade to the latest version of Fedora Core, which can be obtained from: If this issue turns out to still be reproduceable in the latest version of Fedora Core, please file a bug report in the X.Org bugzilla located at http://bugs.freedesktop.org in the "xorg" component. Once you've filed your bug report to X.Org, if you paste the new bug URL here, Red Hat will continue to track the issue in the centralized X.Org bug tracker, and will review any bug fixes that become available for consideration in future updates.