Well, I’ve worked my way through the mtab~ file problems, given up trying to manage the Grub start-up screen, added tsched=0 to PulseAudio’s default.pa file like crazy, and setup OpenOffice software my way, but I still have one unsolved problem. On on old NForce2 system with an Athlon 2500 CPU, Gnome causes the system to shut-off when running screensaver. If instead I use either KDE desktop (or something as old as Tom’s Window Manager), I have no such problem. Then the system happily screensaves for a day (I tested). So somehow the cause is Gnome.
I first assumed that the problem must be in gnome-screensaver, so I killed gnome-screensaver and started xscreensaver for a test. No luck, the system still shut itself off after a half-hour in screensaver. Next, I used gconf-editor to disable all ways that I thought might lead to a turning off of the system (i.e., I set practically every parameter for gnome-power-manager and gnome-screensaver to disable hibernation, set timeouts to a week etc.). No luck there either. Then I tar’ed up all the files in /var/log, let the system shut-off in screensaver, then compared the saved /var/log files with whatever was reported after. I couldn’t find anything of interest.
Now the shut-off isn’t normal shutdown; SUSE complains with startup that the file systems weren’t properly closed down. Fortunately, file system recovery has always succeeded, but that’s partly because I close most open files before I lock my desktop or let the desktop close for inactively. So something abnormal is happening, but I can’t as yet tell what. And how could the choice of desktop matter?
Thanks for any help, Jim Reed