System hangs overnight.

[pblanton]

KDE4.x is the shiz-nit... but my newly formatted and installed Dell Optiplex 755 hangs overnight. I suspect the screen saver.

I don't want the system shutting down and/or hibernating. I want to burn electricity when I am not at the PC, so I have all that **** turned off, but I do want it running a nice looking screen saver when I am not at the PC.

I selected Euphoria (GL) from the OpenGL screen savers. For somereason (maybe not screen saver related at all), the system is solidly hung after resting for a time. Usually overnight. When I come back, it is black-screened and the monitor's power light is amber (meaning no signal). The PC is still on and running but will absolutely not light back up. I have to cold-boot the system to get it back up. It sucks.

Any ideas?

[dibl]

Re: System hangs overnight.

Couple of thoughts ...

1. Don't use the power button to reboot it, unless absolutely necessary. First try Alt-SysRq RSEIUB.

2. Open Kpowersave and make a little study of your selected "Active Scheme" and all that stuff. I'm not an expert on it, but there are multiple combinations and one might work better than what you have set. Hopefully you have Kpowersave installed ... if not,

sudo apt-get install kpowersave

and then Alt-F2 "kpowersave".

On my desktop, I sometimes use "Suspend to RAM" aka S2RAM in Kpowersave -- essentially it is a "directed hibernate" to the swap space. The trick is you have to have a swap space bigger than all the running processes at the moment that you suspend it. There's no screen saver running, however, it's just a black out.

3. The connection between screen savers and power saving is a bit, errr, "looser" in Linux than in Windows. So you probably need to look into things like acpi to learn what can be done -- I mostly use a desktop and don't know a ton about it, but you need to look way beyond screen savers for answers to hibernation issues.

[pblanton]

Re: System hangs overnight.

Wow! Thanks for the exhaustive response... and so quickly after my question. How did you have time to type all that?

I have turned off the screen savers for now. I'll dig into your suggestions and get back as soon as I have more information.

Thanks again! This is what I love about the Linux community.