[Debian-eeepc-devel] Weird behavior with display

[Alan Jenkins]

On 11/1/09, Ernesto Domato <edomat at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, I have a 901 running sid with the Gnome window manager.

<nitpick>You mean desktop environment.  The window manager is called
metacity</nitpick>

 Since the
> last upgrade, I'm having a weird behavior with the display that if I
> shutdown the computer while logged on a Gnome session, the display
> goes black all the shutdown process

> and when I turn on the computer
> again it keeps black till the end of the boot process that remains
> black till I log on on the Gnome session again. The black screen is
> even with the Asus pre-boot screen.

Are you actually saying you have to type

"username <enter>"
"password <enter">"

*at a black screen*, before you can see anything at all on the screen?

It seems more likely that the first thing you see is the GDM login
screen.  IOW, it seems more likely that the blackscreen condition is
fixed as soon as the X server is started.

> If I shutdown the computer from
> the GDM login screen it do it well (I can see the messages killing all
> the process) and then when I turn it on again it does work properly (I
> see the Asus screen and all the boot process till the GDM login screen
> that is shown too).
>
> If someone could point me where to look to investigate the problem
> I'll really appreciate it.
>
> Thanks,
> Ernesto.

I have absolutely no idea.  I would call it a bug in X that it could
leave your system in this state - unless there is some other program
screwing with the video hardware at the same time, which really isn't
on.

Have you configured your system to use a graphical framebuffer
console?  (If you don't know what I mean, the answer is no. If you do
know what I mean, the question is why you haven't tried disabling it
already :-).  Note that "I enabled kernel mode setting" also counts as
a "yes").

One thought that comes to mind is that it could be a problem with the
brightness setting for the backlight... it might be worth having a
bash at the brightness keys when you have a black screen.

Do you use an external monitor at all?  Do you run a special applet or
something for it?

Here are a few things I might try if it happened to me:-

1) I assume "shutdown while logged into a gnome session" means the
obvious "use the gnome GUI to shutdown the computer".

a) What happens if you run "halt" from a gnome terminal instead?

b) If the above still causes a black screen - does the same thing
happen if you log in with "failsafe mode" (I think this will open a
single gnome terminal, but not the gnome desktop).

c) What happens if, after logging into gnome, you switch to a console
(i.e. ctrl+alt+f1), login and run "halt"?

I wouldn't suggest you try installing KDE, but as a last resort you
might play with installing KDM.  I seem to remember from experience
that the desktop environments have standardised the interface for the
login manager, so that you may be able to invoke shutdown from a gnome
session even if you run KDM instead of GDM.

Alan