CentOS - Sep 2008 - LCD blanks out overnight

I inherited an ancient Dell Latitude C840 and recently installed CentOS 5.2 on
it.  It worked fine for the most part, but when I left it overnight and came
back the next morning, the screen blacked out and wouldn't come back unless
I did a hard reset.  Even though I turned off all the power management settings
and left it set like a desktop, the next morning after that it still blacked
out.  I thought maybe it'd come back if I switched from X to a virtual text
console, but that didn't do the trick.  Has anyone seen this and what do I
do to fix it?

tia,

  - Joe

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hmmm, usually ctrl-alt f1 would fix this.  Sine that isn't  working,
have u tried switching to external vga and back.  That did the trick
for me on Dell Latitude C610's.

On 9/9/08, Joe Tseng <joe_tseng at hotmail.com>
wrote:
> I inherited an ancient Dell Latitude C840 and recently installed CentOS 5.2
> on it.  It worked fine for the most part, but when I left it overnight and
> came back the next morning, the screen blacked out and wouldn't come
back
> unless I did a hard reset.  Even though I turned off all the power
> management settings and left it set like a desktop, the next morning after
> that it still blacked out.  I thought maybe it'd come back if I
switched
> from X to a virtual text console, but that didn't do the trick.  Has
anyone
> seen this and what do I do to fix it?
>
> tia,
>
>   - Joe
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Stay up to date on your PC, the Web, and your mobile phone with Windows
> Live.
> http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/msnnkwxp1020093185mrt/direct/01/

Joe Tseng wrote:
> I inherited an ancient Dell Latitude C840 and recently installed CentOS 5.2
> on it.  It worked fine for the most part, but when I left it overnight and
> came back the next morning, the screen blacked out and wouldn't come
back
> unless I did a hard reset.  Even though I turned off all the power
> management settings and left it set like a desktop, the next morning after
> that it still blacked out.  I thought maybe it'd come back if I
switched
> from X to a virtual text console, but that didn't do the trick.  Has
anyone
> seen this and what do I do to fix it?
Is the machine still responsive? e.g. does the caps light key work? Or
is it frozen solid?

I don't know how many laptops it affects but my previous Toshiba laptops
had problems where if the screen went into power save mode about 70% of
the time the only way to get it to turn back on was to either reboot the
box or put it in suspend/sleep/hibernate and wake it up again. Toshiba
said this was a common problem across vendors that used multiple cores
in their laptops.  Microsoft released a fix for it for XP about a year
and a half ago(though as the fix was a specialized fix not a generic
fix that was pushed out to users I didn't realize it until after I
switched off of XP and onto Ubuntu, took a while until a version
of Ubuntu came out that could suspend/resume on that system). I could
not find any related fix for X11, so I just disabled screen blanking
in the X server.

It's been a while and I don't have that laptop anymore but what
I believe I did was add

Options "-DPMS"

To the monitor section of xorg.conf, see the man page for xorg.conf
for other DPMS related options.

Of course that just turns off screen blanking/power off, if your
system is crashing, that's another topic..

nate

On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 09:39 -0400, Joe Tseng wrote:
> I inherited an ancient Dell Latitude C840 and recently installed
> CentOS 5.2 on it.  It worked fine for the most part, but when I left
> it overnight and came back the next morning, the screen blacked out
> and wouldn't come back unless I did a hard reset.  Even though I
> turned off all the power management settings and left it set like a
> desktop, the next morning after that it still blacked out.  I thought
> maybe it'd come back if I switched from X to a virtual text console,
> but that didn't do the trick.  Has anyone seen this and what do I do
> to fix it?
http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/quirk/

-- 
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams <ivazqueznet at gmail.com>

PLEASE don't CC me; I'm already subscribed
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