[Tfug] Weird Linux Mint 14 issue - Unable to unlock screen

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 1:22 PM, Christopher Robbins <robbinsc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's a weird one...Built a new Linux Mint box.  Install worked with no
> issue (though had to wrap my head around adding an EFI partition to boot
> into the box).  When I leave the machine for a bit and come back, I cannot
> get past the screen lock.  No login window pops up - my only resolution is
> to restart X (and lose everything I had open :-/ ).
>
> Anybody have this issue before?

Christopher,

I have had a similar problem occasionally on my laptop.  I'm running
Debian/Sid on the machine and it has the typical onboard Intel
graphics.

There are two very similar problems on my laptop.  The first is just
like yours.  If I leave the computer for a while, the screen saver
will start and then not long after that the screen will shut off via
DPMS.  I can *usually* bring it back by hitting a key or moving the
mouse (I don't have it set to lock my screen), but sometimes it just
checks itself out.  I can see the mouse cursor and that's it.

The other problem appears to occur more or less randomly.  Sometimes,
but not too often, the screen will simply freeze while I am working.
I think this happens most often after a window has opened or closed.
Again, I can still move the mouse around, but that's it.  Everything
else on the screen remains stuck... that is, visible but no longer
updating.

In both of these cases, if I switch to a virtual terminal the computer
is still running just fine.  I can log in and then attempt to stop the
login manager.  In this case, I'm using lightdm instead of gdm.  This
*does* stop lightdm, but it doesn't fix the problem because the X
process is no longer responding.  I then perform a "kill -9" on that
process which finally kills X and also causes most of the other
remaining X processes to exit/die as well.  At this point, I can
restart lightdm, switch back to VT7, and continue with what I was
doing.

It is certainly annoying, but it doesn't occur so often that the
machine is unusable.  I don't know the true cause of this, but I have
strong suspicions that it is a bug in the Intel video driver.  I
suppose it is a bug specific to this particular Intel video hardware
as I have used the Intel driver on several other PCs and laptops and
have never run into *any* problems with it.


--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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