Arch Linux

Darktex

Member

Registered: 2010-11-25

Posts: 1

Random screen freeze [unable to get it work again till reboot]

Hello everyone,

I've been using ArchLinux for ~3 months on my laptop and I find it great (well, I moved from Ubuntu...).

Given how well I found Arch, I talked about that to all of my friends. One of them has actually installed it, but he's got troubles in making Arch work properly.

I tried to give him a hand with no result, and so did the italian ArchLinux forum. You guys are the last chance we got.

The problem is all about those random screen freezes: basically, while he's on ArchLinux, his screen turns off. Everything's fine in background (we could even plug it in via VGA cable to another screen and it was ok), but there seems to be no way to make it turn on again.

We googled a while and there are a few issues that seemed close to ours, but they were all related to energy saving settings. We issued some setterm commands which I can't retrieve right now and we went to rc.conf to remove all powersaving settings (which weren't there).

He's got GNOME on X, so we removed all screensavers/screen freezes and so on. It's got nothing to do with that (at least, it doesn't look like it has).
This happens in ArchLinux only, he's got no problems at all in running Ubuntu for hours and hours so I don't think it can be his bios.

He's got a Turion as CPU and a Radeon HD 3400 as video card (drivers are xf86-video-ati). He's got Gnome + Compiz on Arch (and the same on Ubuntu). His laptop is a Toshiba Satellite A300D for further reference.

Funny stuff is that I've got a Satellite A300 myself: the only difference is that I've got an Intel CPU... And that Arch works great to me!

PS: He even reinstalled Arch with Gnome and Compiz again... Still, nothing has changed.