I’m using OpenSUSE 11.4, and am accomplishing most day-to-day tasks on it fine. But on some occasions (thankfully not often), the screen goes black for a few seconds, then it boots me out to the log-in screen. The two activities I noticed this occurred on are:
When running the x11vnc server (v0.9.14) on my pc and vnc’ing to it from another pc. That works fine for several minutes, but the longer I stay vnc’ed, the more likely that eventually, the screen goes black a few seconds, and it boots me back to the log-in screen.
I recently installed the synergy server on my pc, to widen my desktop to include a monitor from another pc. This seemed to be working fine all day, with the mouse/keyboard able to jump in use from pc-to-pc. But towards the end of the day, the same thing happened. Upon dragging the mouse from one pc’s screen (my windows pc) to the other (my opensuse pc), the screen went black for a few seconds, and it booted me out to the log-in screen.
I did google on “opensuse blackscreen”, although got many hits on scenarios that didn’t sound like this one, so thought I’d better ask it. Any ideas? Any particular log files I should be looking at that could give me some hints?
Regards,
Gurce
PS. There is one aspect of my pc that I am suspicious about, so I’d better mention. I’ve connected two monitors to my OpenSUSE PC and configured them for TwinView (ie, side-by-side, to expand my desktop-space). One monitor is 1680x1050, while the other is 1920x1080. Since they aren’t exactly the same size, when they’re joined in twinview, it means that there is a small off-screen area on the smaller screen where the mouse can travel into (the off-screen area that allows the height to match up with the larger monitor). Sometimes if I accidentally click the mouse within this ‘nether-region’, strange things happen (I recall the default desktop view would automatically swap to the ‘Folder’ view on the desktop), so I learnt to avoid accidentally clicking in there.
But it did make me wonder whether there is some illegal reading/writing to this nether-region that activities like mouse-clicking, using vnc/synergy are triggering…
So if openSUSE 11.4 has work for all of this time, over two years, but suddenly has a problem. Something has changed and the two most common items are: You are installing new software or hardware, released after openSUSE 1.4 came out OR a hardware problems has occurred. Hardware could be failing or you could just be over heating and in need of a real good cleaning job to blow out all heat sinks, make sure all cooling fans work and to reseat all modules and plug out and in all cables, at least one time.
If this is due to new software or hardware, it may be time to consider doing an openSUSE upgrade to version 12.3 today. Else, its time for that spring cleaning, now just in time for summer.