On Jan 11, 2008 1:42 PM, Ryan B. Lynch <ryan.b.lynch@gmail.com> 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.

This started about a week ago, right after I got dual head up and
running on my Radeon.  Things were working fine, and then after I
installed the 'fglrx' kernel and Xorg drivers and started using the dual
head setup, I noticed these little glitches.  Since 'fglrx' is from
Livna, I just figured it was a bug.  In the meantime, I'd rather have
dual head and just deal with the annoyance or having to restart my X
session every so often.

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.

If you haven't managed to fix this, would Would you mind trying to do a
'lock session', to compare the behavior of your system?  Also, are you
using the 'fglrx' driver?  Are you using dual head?

Also, does anybody else know if this list is appropriate for continuing
this thread?  Can you suggest a better place to which we could move it?

Thanks,
Ryan

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).

I am not offering this as a definitive solution but it might be worth a look.


--
Keith