[GRLUG] screen problem (continued from November)

[Eric Beversluis]

On Thu, 2010-11-25 at 08:22 -0500, Eric Beversluis wrote: 
"Lately a few times my screen has seemed to go out on me--mostly, I
think, after the computer has been sitting and has locked and dimmed.
When I come back and use the mouse/touchpad to get to the login screen,
it does not respond. If I power down the machine and reboot, it comes up
fine, so I think it's a software rather than hardware problem. Any ideas
about how I might troubleshoot/fix this?"

At that time the thread went down the road of trying ctrl-alt-f(n) to
switch between virtual terminals and get things going again.

This didn't seem to help. I don't think it's a Gnome desktop problem,
since there is always a very faint image of the desktop on the screen.
For the past month or so I have been accessing the computer only via
NoMachine (NX). 

Discussion of my problem on the openSUSE forum focused on
powermanagement problems. I turned off all screen saving and dimming
features and gave up using Suspend and Hibernate, but that did not help.
In any case, the fact that it continues to be a problem with Ubuntu
shows that it's (most likely) not a software problem.

Just today the screen popped back on after not working for several
weeks. During that time, there would occasionally be a flicker of life
in the screen (typically the Lenovo splash screen showing just for a
second or so); there seems always to be a very faint image (eg, I can
just make out the form of the logon screen and once I log in I can
ever-so-faintly make out the Desktop). 

What happened just before screen popped on: I had been running an NX
session as usual. From terminal in NX I did 'sudo init 0'. Then before
the Lenovo had completely shut down I removed the power cable to use it
on another box. Just as the shutdown completed I saw ever-so-briefly the
Ubuntu logo. When I rebooted after a couple of hrs (without the power
cable), the screen worked perfectly. Plugging the power cable in after a
bit did not affect screen operation.

Experiment: hibernate and restart. Result: screen came back fine. But,
based on past experience, I'm expecting it to go out again at any time.

Web research suggested that this kind of problem related to the screen
power inverter. After a frustrating month, I finally got a new inverter
delivered and that did not make any difference.

Lenovo 3000 N100.

Thanks.


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