Frozen

[Bill Oliver]

On Thu, 8 Aug 2013, Patrick Dupre wrote:

> Thank,
>
> Here more information
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> On a fedora 19 laptop, I use to experience frosing of the screen.
>>> It may have different matter, like unable to compose in a terminal
>>> window (but sill able to use the mouse), or in the worst situation,
>>> the screen remains black (no way to use the keyboard), ie. I need to
>>> unpluck the laptop and remove the battery.
>>> This looks like to linked to the screen locking. I do not use a
>>> screensaver.
>>> I do not know how to debug this issue!
>>>
>>> Can I get some helps?
>>>
>>> Thank.
>>>
>>
>> There are two things that immediately come to mind. The first is that you don't have the right driver for your graphics card. The symptoms you describe used to happen to me all the time, but in recent fedora releases, it's been pretty good at figuring out the right driver. You might need to tell folk what laptop you have and what kind of graphics it has.
>
> Dell Inspiron 9400,
> The setting says: Gallium 0.4 on ATI RV515 (1440 x 900)
> I did not experience this issue on a fedora 16 (on the same laptop)


Well, that may be a problem, though you are bouncing up against the limit of my knowledge.  The Dell Inspiron 9400 is *supposed* to have an NVidia 7900 graphics card.  So, unless the graphics card has been replaced, you may well be running the wrong driver.

It's been so long since I had a problem like that I don't really remember all the steps I took to fix it.  Generally, the idea went like this:

1) Install the OS with a basic, generic driver (such as VESA).  That should get you some sort of usable GUI and let you get the desktop up.

2) Find out what driver you should use and either download or install it.  I don't know which driver that is, sorry.  The last time I had a laptop with an NVidia card, I had to download and install it from NVidia.

3) Reboot.

No guarantee on that, though.

billo