crashes adjusting screen brightness Dell Inspiron N4010, openSUSE 11.4, GNOME 3.0.2

English Hardware
#1

I have a Dell Inspiron N4010 running openSUSE 11.4 and GNOME 3.0.2.

It doesn’t happen every time, but occasionally when I adjust the screen brightness the screen goes black and then I get what looks like a screenshot of the beginning of the boot-up process (i.e. a terminal screen with stuff that looks like the output of the “dmesg” command). At first, I thought it had something to do with the brightness adjust buttons (fn-F4 and fn-F5 on this laptop), but as an experiment, I opened up the “Screen” settings tab in the system settings and dragged the brightness adjuster around a bit, and sure enough it crashed. I also originally thought it had to do with what applications I had running because it only seemed to happen when I had both Firefox and a terminal window open, but I also tested that and found that it didn’t seem to matter. Now my theory is that it happens when I try to adjust the brightness too quickly and the system can’t keep up.

So, my main question: Obviously this is a bug. How and where do I need to report it?
Related question: What kind of information do I need to include in a bug report?

#2

Your symptoms are a little different from mine. If you have an Intel graphics card, then it is probably the same or a similar problem.

Here’s the thread where I discussed the problem:
System freeze and possible diagnosis

#3

No, it’s not Intel graphics. It’s an ATI Mobility Radeon. Here’s the relevant output from “lspci -nnk”:

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc M96 [Mobility Radeon HD 4650] [1002:9480]
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0456]
	Kernel driver in use: radeon
#4

If I remember correctly, there were some posts about freezes related to ATI video. I’m not sure, but there might be an alternative driver from ATI that you can try. I suggest you look for threads with “freeze” in the title, perhaps going back a few months.

#5

There is guidance for raising bug reports on openSUSE here: openSUSE:Submitting bug reports - openSUSE You can use your openSUSE forum username and password when logging on to bugzilla. Try to choose as succinct and pertinant bug title as possible.

Attach to the bug report the output of:


/sbin/lspci -nnk | grep VGA -A2

and also as attachments the files /var/log/Xorg.0.log and the file /var/log/messages and the output of ‘dmesg’ (you may need to redirect that output to a text file with ‘dmesg > mydmesg.txt’ or something like that).

If not a Gnome-3 problem (which I suppose is possible) then this could be an upstream radeon driver problem, in which case you may need to ask the person answering the openSUSE bug report as to where upstream the bug report needs to be raised.

Good luck.

p.s. The AMD/ATI proprietary Catalyst graphic driver should also likely work with your hardware.