DVI monitor won't wake up?

[Ben Scott]

On 4/4/06, Cole Tuininga <colet at code-energy.com> wrote:
> Thanks to a good tax return this year, I finally have my first new
> system in about 4 years.

  (Some would say that's a bad tax return.  (Better to keep your money
and earn interest on it.)  But this isn't gnhlug-accounting, so... ;-)
)

> It's a Dell XPS 400 with a Pentium D 820 ...

  Mmmmm.... drool...

> ... Dell 2001FP which has DVI ...

  Mmmmm... double drool...

  Digital video is very nice.  The resulting picture is incredibly sharp.

> Here's where the problem comes in.  I got home last night, turned on the
> monitor ... and waited.  No sync.  Hmmm.  Move the mouse, hit some keys
> on the keyboard.  No sync.  That's weird.

  Did/does tapping the [NUM LOCK] key toggle the corresponding LED on
and off?  What about the "magic SysRq keys"?  Does [ALT]+[SysRq]+[S]
(sync) cause disk activity and a log entry, for example.  (Note that
magic SysRq is a kernel compile option and a sysctl runtime option, so
it may not be enabled on your system.) These tests will tell you how
dead (or not) the console is.

  I've had similar trouble on my home PC on occasion.  It appears the
X server is going to sleep for good.  Num Lock does not toggle.  SysRq
can sync disks, reboot, power off, etc., but resetting the keyboard
mode (to switch to VC1) doesn't work.  I haven't had an opportunity to
try SSH yet.  I usually end up doing a warm reboot using the
front-panel RESET switch, which has always fixed the problem (unlike
for you).

  Fedora Core 4
  kernel-2.6.15-1.1831_FC4
  xorg-x11-6.8.2-37.FC4.49.2
  ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 7500, 64 MB, RV200 GPU, AGP

> It took an actual power cycle (just soft rebooting didn't do the trick)
> to get it to come back up.

  Hmmm, that implies the video card is fairly well hosed.  A warm boot
will cause the BIOS to (attempt to) reset the video card.  If that's
not working, the card must be deep in hyperspace.

  Whose video driver are you using?  You might try switching (i.e., if
you're using NVidia's binary-only driver, try the FOSS one, or vice
versa.)

-- Ben