Keith Hunt wrote:
On Jan 11, 2008 1:42 PM, Ryan B. Lynch <ryan.b.lynch@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:ryan.b.lynch@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Mickey Bankhead wrote:
> I have some new dell optiplex 755 desktops. F8 installed great, but
> after 10 minutes of inactivity, the machine appears to be locked up /
> frozen. The mouse arrow pointer will still move around, but mouse
clicks
> don't do anything, and the keyboard won't respond.
> CTRL-ALT-BKSPC will crash X back to a black screen, but that's IT.
> CTRL-ALT-F1 will get me a log-in prompt, I can log in, but the init3
> command will hang after 10 seconds or so
>
> I suspect it's the power management trying to go to sleep or shut
> something down, but I've got limited options in power management, and
> with everything there set to NEVER, it still happens.
>
> I can use the machine for an hour if I don't let it get idle...
> PS. Related? - the Screen Saver screen will NEVER come up - I
just get a
> blank white window where it should show the screen saver options,
but no
> items on the screen...
Did you ever resolve this? I think I have the same problem, on an
Optiplex 745. If I leave the X session idle for long enough, or if I
attempt to do a 'lock session' from the KDE menu, I get a very similar
behavior to what you described: mouse clicks and keyboard don't work,
although the mouse can still move around the screen, and I can either
CTRL+ALT+F1 or CTRL+ALT+BKSP without a problem.
Looking in the Xorg log, I noticed that every time this happens, there's
a corresponding pair of log messages:
SetClientVersion: 0 9
SetGrabKeysState - disabled
I don't know what those mean, but the timing is not a coincidence.
I have experienced similar problems with Fedora 6 and 7 although they
seemed to occur only intermittently. I never found a real answer, at
least partly because I could never reproduce the problem at will. I
started to suspect the screen saver and the last time it happened I was
able to fix it by killing the screen saver (via an SSH session from
another machine).
That's a really interesting idea--I didn't stop to check whether the
screen saver had activated and somehow failed, although that would go a
long way toward explaining the observed behavior.
I did a little Googling, and it looks like the 'SetGrabKeysState -
disabled' line in the logs is supposed to happen when the screen
saver/lock takes over. There should also be a corresponding
'SetGrabKeysState - enabled' line, when the user takes control back.
Now that I think about it, I did have one of those pretty OpenGL screen
savers selected. I can try the obvious thing, which is to switch to a
blank screen saver, and a non-OpenGL screen saver, and see if there's a
difference in the behavior.
If I can establish that the problem is, in fact, the OpenGL screen
saver, that might also explain your (Keith Hunt) problem being
intermittent. A lot of Fedora desktops I've seen have been set to
random select a different screen saver each time it turns on--so
sometimes you'd get an OpenGL one that screws the pooch, and other times
it would be a non-OpenGL one that works just fine.
Too much speculation--when I get in front of that my Fedora machine,
again, I'll keep digging and I'll see what I can find.
-Ryan
