Thinkpads Forum

Greetings,

I installed Fedora Core 5 linux on a T20 which I had received free from my brother. It was missing a power supply and the disc had been wiped, so it was inoperable when I got it, but as far as I know, it worked OK except for a missing A/C adapter and battery. I got the adapter, installed Fedora, and it seemed to work fine - except when I put it into "suspend", either with the Fn-F4 keys, or by choosing that option from the desktop, the desktop did not come back. Rebooting or changing the "virtual" terminal via Alt-Ctrl-F7 brought back a desktop, but it was a garish travesty of itself: weird psychedelic colors, moire patterns, and an outsized display which meant some options were not on the screen. This would sometimes persist even on reboot. I even booted with Knoppix (CD based linux), and the display was the same. I was trying all kinds of things, and, either through my changes or maybe something else, the screen would eventually return to normal.
But now it really seems to be stuck that way, hence my post. Can anyone offer any helpful advice? First of all, do you think it just might be failing hardware? After all, using a CD-based OS like Knoppix didn't change anything. Or maybe something that gets set and stays that way until something resets it?
What can you tell me?

Thanks....

Frank Huddleston

It sounds like what happens when I change the resolution on my Fedora Core 4 install on a ThinkPad A31p. The tools are a little strange because if you use the GUI, you have to change "Screen Resolution" but often the settings for "Display" will have the monitor set incorrectly (set to something like 1400x1050 instead of 1600x1400) and when those two don't match, I get strange color blobs, odd warping and wrap-around effets, etc. When I set them up both properly, things work fine. I usually have to boot into text mode and edit the Xorg.conf manually.

I don't know why that would happen on sleep and resume, but I've never gotten any form of sleeping to work with my A31p. Since I use it as a file server / Azureus front end, that isn't a problem. I just leave it running with the lid down.

Anyway, I recommend booting into text mode and checking that your Xorg.conf specifies the correct resolution on the video card and monitor sections. Don't know what to say about sleeping though...

Suspend and resume are enough of a problem with both Ubuntu and FC5 that there is a huge litany of complaints and possible solutions on the web.

Well does anyone have any idea how to get my screen back the way it should be? It's stuck in a "Psychedelic Clown" scheme right now. Kind of flickers and shows "static". It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the distro; survives reboots, I powered off, pulled the power, and held the power button down for 1 minute; still the same. Even Knoppix looks like that, although: Knoppix actually suspends and resumes!
It's not just in X Windows that it looks this way; even upon first booting, before grub even does its thing, I can see the effect.
Any suggestions? Could it be that the video card is failing? Are there any diagnostics I could run for this? It's a Savage video card.
Thanks...

Frank H.l

Here's an update to my "garish screen" problem. I know I hate it when I'm doing a search on a problem, and I find a post with my problem exactly and... no answers. Plus, it's dated a few years back; you know that's a bad sign. So I'll post an update here: my problem might be solved.
The first thing I did which seemed to have a positive effect was use apm instead of acpi. I found this advice in a post, a few years old, about Fedora Core 3, I think. I don't reliably remember details, but it involved a boot parameter, in grub.conf, to either disable acpi or enable apm; I think the latter. Then you had to turn on the apm module in the kernel (or something like that) with ckconfig. Again, I don't remember the details exactly.
This enabled suspend via Fn-F4 to work and resume as it should, except:
the screen stayed corrupted.
On the chance that it might be hardware failing, I took the machine to a place where someone could give me advice, booted it up and... it came up normal! Seemed to be working! This surely seemed to point to hardware - after all, I had not done anything to the software since the last time I used the computer and the screen was corrupted. So I came home, booted the computer, and: the screen was corrupted!
I turned it off, and when, sometime later, I booted the machine and the screen had returned to normal, I took the opportunity to install OpenSUSE 10.1 from a DVD I had made. Since then the computer has been functioning with a normal screen, plus it suspends and resumes with Fn-F4 and Fn, respectively.
I still suspect that hardware might be intermittently failing, because of the history. But at least the suspend works "out of the box" on SUSE, and I get to check out a different distribution.