F8 hangs after 10 minutes inactivity on Dell optiplex 755

[Ryan B. Lynch]

Keith Hunt wrote:
> 
> 
> On Jan 11, 2008 1:42 PM, Ryan B. Lynch <ryan.b.lynch at gmail.com 
> <mailto:ryan.b.lynch at 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.

>     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