Experienced Linux Mint users?

[demarpaint]

Originally Posted By: Garak
Originally Posted By: demarpaint
It happened again today. I left the machine for a while, had streaming news running and came back to a bluish/black screen.

I noticed when my Mint/Mate setup goes to shut the monitor down after a period of inactivity, it kind of sits like that, but comes back when I hit the mouse. It's like a period between the OS not sending anything to the screen, but before the monitor shuts itself down because of no signal or because power management tells it to shut down. It sits like that, I move the mouse, then the password screen comes up, and I'm back at my normal screen where I was before that happened.

I'm not the greatest hardware guy, so I'm going to be shooting in the dark a bit, but your problem does seem kind of odd. Basically, you get to that situation, and it won't start displaying again from moving the mouse? Does it still do nothing when you hit a key? The reason I ask is because I cannot wake up my computer with a mouse move, but I can with a key press, and then a mouse move to bring the password unlocker up.

Now, the power management is separate from the screen saver. Try disabling your screen saver and see what happens. My screen saver, just checked it now, is set to go to a blank screen after five minutes. But, the display is put to sleep under power management when inactive for 30 minutes.



Thanks for the reply, to clarify, moving the mouse or hitting anything on the keyboard won't turn the monitor on when the system has one of these episodes. I went almost 4 days w/o an event.

The screen saver is set to off, however I have the monitor sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity. Sleep, hibernate or anything related is turned off.

I might try leaving the monitor on all the time and see what happens. That's next in line. I might also try another monitor again. The reason is because the tweaks that I made that stopped the ghost issue were done after I tried the second monitor. Maybe the monitor is bad? It's easy enough to put the second monitor back on. What's odd is power is going to the monitor, it has the orange light on when this happens, but the light won't turn blue indicating the display is working. Unplugging the monitor fixes that.

The ghost issue has been resolved, so I'm moving slowly in the right direction.

 

[JeepWJ19]

Originally Posted By: Garak

Now, the power management is separate from the screen saver. Try disabling your screen saver and see what happens. My screen saver, just checked it now, is set to go to a blank screen after five minutes. But, the display is put to sleep under power management when inactive for 30 minutes.

Could be plausible.


Just throwing ideas out but you could try a different display manager. I forget what Mint uses but IIRC it's mdm as display manager.

You could do the following:
Code:


sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lightdm-gtk-greeter-team/stable

apt update && apt install lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter light-locker light-locker-settings

apt purge mdm


Then disable every possible setting in mate-screensaver and then in light-locker-settings set the lock timeout to something like a minute or so and see if it still freezes up

 

[dishdude]

If it isn't difficult for you to reimage the drive, it would be interesting to see if 18.1 Mate or an older version of Cinnamon still causes the system to freeze up.

 

[Garak]

Originally Posted By: demarpaint

I might try leaving the monitor on all the time and see what happens. That's next in line. I might also try another monitor again. The reason is because the tweaks that I made that stopped the ghost issue were done after I tried the second monitor. Maybe the monitor is bad? It's easy enough to put the second monitor back on. What's odd is power is going to the monitor, it has the orange light on when this happens, but the light won't turn blue indicating the display is working. Unplugging the monitor fixes that.

It could be the monitor. As I mentioned before to you, I was having a similar problem with a work monitor when it was on its way out. The only way to get it working again would be to unplug it and plug it back in. Eventually, that got less and less reliable, and I had to replace it.

As Jeep indicates, if it's not the monitor, it's worth trying another display manager, or even another desktop package. In relation to what dishdude suggested, even try some Live DVDs or the like and see what happens when using that.

 

[demarpaint]

Thanks for all the good ideas. I installed Timeshift, which I'm assuming is similar to System Restore in Windows, where it can bring the OS back to an earlier time. So I could play around more with settings, the mdm, etc. and always revert back. I can also clone the HDD. If anyone knows anything about Timeshift let me know it that's reliable or if I'm better off cloning the drive.

I have a feeling the monitor might be on its way out, and I'm going to try it few days with another monitor. I also took the monitor in question and put it on a Win 10 machine. If there's problems on the Win 10 machine that monitor is getting pitched.

 

[Garak]

Yes, let us know how the other monitor pans out. As for Timeshift, I haven't tried it. For backing up, I just use tar in the command line.

 

[demarpaint]

Update: I switched monitors, the 24" monitor which was on my Linux box the computer in question is now on my wife's machine. There hasn't been any issues since Saturday on either machine. Her monitor is on my machine, an older View Sonic 19" monitor.

The bigger [problem] monitor is a 1920x1080, her's is 1440x900. Her computer is older than mine and running the bigger monitor at a much lower resolution, her machine can't run a higher resolution due to its age. I have Win 10 on her machine, and the power management is set up similar to this machine. It will power off the monitor after 30 minutes, no sleep or hibernation. I realize I have made it a bit longer w/o issue, but this problem has me really confused now. I wish I had another tower that could utilize the monitor in question at 1920x1080.

 

[Garak]

So, any updates for us yet?

 

[demarpaint]

It worked well with the older monitor, no black screen issues at all. A few tweaks were made and I switched back to the better monitor yesterday morning. Now I have to wait and see.

I will update the thread, hopefully with the fix..............

 

[demarpaint]

I'm going to call this solved. I replaced the Dell monitor with a Samsung monitor and have no problems. The Dell monitor is working fine on my wife's Win 10 machine, so she's happy with the upgrade.

Dell has power management built into the monitor, Samsung doesn't it uses the computer OS software for power management. With the Dell PM set on or off I had problems. It appears that might have been the issue. Many thanks to all those who helped!