Computer freezes on X start and screen fades to white

BeholdMyGlory · 2010-09-27 18:29:58

Whenever I start X, the computer freezes after a few seconds and then the screen slowly starts fading to white, beginning from the bottom right corner and spreading to the rest of the screen. The computer works perfectly when I boot into bash, but as soon as I run startx it freezes after just a few seconds. It's worked perfectly before, and this started happening just last week. I think it might be some kind of overheating issue or something like that, does anyone have any suggestions?
I uploaded a video demonstrating the problem to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qm2zvdR8osk (please excuse the tremendously poor quality, I actually made it to show a few friends but figured that it might serve a purpose here as well).

x33a · 2010-09-28 03:32:55

Maybe it's a problem with the graphics card or the graphics drivers. Which card are you using? Also, did you update the drivers last week?

ewaller · 2010-09-28 03:54:34

BeholdMyGlory wrote:

Whenever I start X, the computer freezes...
... and then the screen slowly starts fading to white, beginning from the bottom right corner and spreading to the rest of the screen.

The fade to white is caused because your computer stops sending LVDS signals to the LCD panel, but leaves the backlight on. The LCD slowly looses the state after it stops being updated.

You say the computer freezes. Are you sure? I expect the screen freezes, but the system is actually still running. A simple test is to try your Num lock and/or Caps lock keys and see if the associated indicator LEDs toggle. While your checking the LEDs, make sure they are not flashing (that would be a sign the kernel panicked)

You might also see if you can log into or ping your system via network.

If the system is up, I would bet the system is trying to drive a display other than your built in LCD. If your keyboard has any function keys for changing displays, you might try them (On this system it would be a Fn key + F4 [There is a picture of a monitor on the key]) If your system has an external monitor port, you might try hooking a monitor to it and see if it is being used.

Lastly, you might boot up without Xorg. Then check your /var/log/Xorg.0.log for any interesting nuggets left there the last time you tried to start X.

BeholdMyGlory · 2010-09-28 17:35:32

ewaller wrote:

The fade to white is caused because your computer stops sending LVDS signals to the LCD panel, but leaves the backlight on. The LCD slowly looses the state after it stops being updated.

I hope that isn't damaging to the hardware?

ewaller wrote:

You say the computer freezes. Are you sure? I expect the screen freezes, but the system is actually still running. A simple test is to try your Num lock and/or Caps lock keys and see if the associated indicator LEDs toggle. While your checking the LEDs, make sure they are not flashing (that would be a sign the kernel panicked)
You might also see if you can log into or ping your system via network.

Quite right, it seems that the whole system does not freeze, since I can still use the magic sysrq key + REISUB, and if I switch to a terminal fast enough, before X freezes, the system continues working with X up. However, as soon as I switch back to X, the keyboard becomes unresponsive and the only way out is REISUB.

ewaller wrote:

If the system is up, I would bet the system is trying to drive a display other than your built in LCD. If your keyboard has any function keys for changing displays, you might try them (On this system it would be a Fn key + F4 [There is a picture of a monitor on the key]) If your system has an external monitor port, you might try hooking a monitor to it and see if it is being used.

Nope, no luck pressing fn+F4. And I don't have an easily accessible monitor that I can test with at the moment, but I can try later.

ewaller wrote:

Lastly, you might boot up without Xorg. Then check your /var/log/Xorg.0.log for any interesting nuggets left there the last time you tried to start X.

My Xorg.0.log: http://paste.pocoo.org/show/268608/

By the way, I tried booting a couple of old (~2007-2008) live CDs of among others Fedora and Xubuntu, but both of them started booting into the console when Usplash was supposed to show up. Trying to run startx from the Fedora terminal results in:
(EE) VESA(0): No matching modes
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.

Fatal server error:
no screens found
giving up.

karol · 2010-09-28 17:38:05

You this started just a couple days ago: have you updated anything? Graphic drivers?

newt · 2010-09-28 17:55:46

My nvidia stoped working after upgrading to kernel26 2.6.35.6-1 with this error message:

(EE) NVIDIA(0): Unable to allocate DMA memory
(EE) NVIDIA(0): Notifier DMA allocation failed
(EE) NVIDIA(0): *** Aborting ***
(EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to allocate EVO DMA push buffer
(EE) NVIDIA(0): *** Aborting ***
(II) UnloadModule: "nvidia"
(II) UnloadModule: "wfb"
(II) UnloadModule: "fb"
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.

I try to recompiled nvidia and nvidia-utils, but still got the same problem.

BeholdMyGlory · 2010-09-28 17:59:25

karol wrote:

You this started just a couple days ago: have you updated anything? Graphic drivers?

This is actually a clean install of Arch I'm running on my laptop, but consider that (as I mentioned in my previous post) I couldn't get X working on three year old live CDs either.

karol · 2010-09-28 18:03:06

BeholdMyGlory wrote:

karol wrote:
You this started just a couple days ago: have you updated anything? Graphic drivers?
This is actually a clean install of Arch I'm running on my laptop, but consider that (as I mentioned in my previous post) I couldn't get X working on three year old live CDs either.

Download some small liveCD, e.g slitaz or tiny core and give it another try.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-09-27 18:29:58

Computer freezes on X start and screen fades to white

#2 2010-09-28 03:32:55

Re: Computer freezes on X start and screen fades to white

#3 2010-09-28 03:54:34

Re: Computer freezes on X start and screen fades to white

#4 2010-09-28 17:35:32

Re: Computer freezes on X start and screen fades to white

#5 2010-09-28 17:38:05

Re: Computer freezes on X start and screen fades to white

#6 2010-09-28 17:55:46

Re: Computer freezes on X start and screen fades to white

#7 2010-09-28 17:59:25

Re: Computer freezes on X start and screen fades to white

#8 2010-09-28 18:03:06

Re: Computer freezes on X start and screen fades to white

Board footer