getting back from a black screen

[Tim Evans]

On 04/08/2013 01:41 PM, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> Tim Evans wrote:
>> On 04/08/2013 11:24 AM, Tim wrote:
>>> Allegedly, on or about 08 April 2013, Richard Vickery sent:
>>>> In the case where you have sensitive information that you don't want
>>>> people looking at it, or children deleting it, how does one get back
>>>> from this screen without rebooting and losing ones work?
>>>
>>> As soon as you go for the mouse or keyboard, a logon prompt appears for
>>> you to type in the password.
>>>
>>> If that's not happening, then it's not a screensaver lockout that you're
>>> facing.  But most likely a graphics crash.  Sometimes that's caused by a
>>> screensaver, some of them are just not that well written, and crash when
>>> they're fired up.
>>>
>>
>> Don't mean to take this too OT, but this is now sounding like the regular
>> "graphics crash" I have whenever I wake my laptop up from
>> hibernation.  Happens
>> consistently with all 3.8.x kernels so far; not with the last 3.7.x
>> kernel.
>
> If you have an ATI/Radeon video setup and are using the stock kernel
> driver instead of the vendor driver, I've seen this before. There are
> two ways to attack this:
> 1 - install the vendor driver for your kernel
>      (I have not had any problems doing this but your computer will be
> impure)
> 2 - you can try adding "nomodset" to the kernel command via editing at boot
>      time (in case it totally screws up your video). I have had this work
>      in about 30% of the machines I tested.
>
> Like any advice regarding kernel command options and/or vendor drivers,
> use your own judgement, this is history of my experience, not advice.

Nvidia/Nouveau drivers here.

# lspci -s 01:00.0 -k
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G86 [Quadro NVS 
140M] (rev a1)
	Subsystem: Lenovo ThinkPad T61
	Kernel driver in use: nouveau

I have filed bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=949666
-- 
Tim Evans			|   5 Chestnut Court
Linux/UNIX Consulting		|   Owings Mills, MD 21117
http://www.tkevans.com/		|   443-394-3864
tkevans at tkevans.com