Dual Monitor Issue?

English Hardware
#1

Hello. I’m not sure if this is the right sub forum for this but here it goes.
I have been using openSUSE KDE on my Dell T3600 for a couple of weeks now and it’s been rock solid.
Yesterday I installed my second monitor and now I have an issue. It is working fine, both monitors are active and the desktop is spread across both of them just as it should be. Everything seems to be perfect, however, last night when I left for the day it was working fine but at some point during the night the system sort of locked up. Both monitors looked to be on power save mode, i.e. they were on but nothing on the screens and the power indicator lights were amber as in no signal. I pressed the keys to try and bring it out but nothing. I know it was still somewhat working because I remoted into my virtual win10 that is also running on this box. I was able to close the VM but was never able to get anything on my monitors so I did a hard shutdown. (FYI this has never happened to this system until after I plugged in the second monitor yesterday) So I rebooted and everything seemed fine again and I thought that maybe it was a fluke. However, I went to a meeting this morning and when I came back a couple of hours later it was in the same state, nothing on the monitors like it was suspended. This time I was NOT able to remote into my win10 VM. So I did another hard shutdown.

Any suggestions? I really need both monitors and I have never had anything like this happen. Not sure where to look but I did check my power settings, disabled, and the screen lock settings, also disabled.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

#2

Could be because of defects in nvidia driver + OpenGL.

Tell us whether the graphic card is nvidia, and whether it uses nvidia driver.

Also tell us which version of opensuse you are using.

#3

openSUSE Leap 42.1

Graphics card is a Dell provided, ATI - Cedar GL FirePro 2270 (dual outputs)
Radeon driver

If you need more information just let me know.

Thanks for the help.

#4

First need to figure out whether this is a graphics issue or not. Although the computer worked with one monitor, I am not very much convinced that it is the second monitor that causes crashes.

When the computer is locked up, can you login into opensuse remotely?

Have you looked into log messages and files? Some relevant ones are obtained via the command dmesg and in files /var/log/messages, /var/log/warn, /var/log/Xorg.0.log. This information can be obtained in text-only mode.

Perhaps you can leave the computer for a night running in text-only mode with two monitors attached.

You can also try desktops other than KDE.

All these are simple steps before an expert looks into xorg.conf and other important places.

#5

Se my answers/questions below:

#6

All the tasks are accomplished as root (also known as superuser). Become superuser either by logging in as root or by saying in a terminal

 
su -

and give the root’s password.

One way to log in remotely is to enable sshd and disable firewall. In Yast, go to Security and Users and disable firewall. Then go to System → /etc/sysconfig Editor and enable service sshd. Now make a test login into the same computer:

 
ssh root@127.0.0.1

To remotely login, you need to know the IP address of Dell 3600. Say

 
ifconfig

and watch the lines that begins with inet addr:
The one which is not 127.0.0.1 is of interest. The line may look like

 inet addr:192.168.1.2  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

From another Linux computer on the same network, make a remote login:

 ssh -X root@192.168.1.2

There is remote-login-over-ssh software for Windows also, called PuTTY.

To view recent kernel messages, say

 
dmesg -T

To view log files, go to folder /var/log/ :

 
cd /var/log/

and there say

 
less messages

This can be done also while being logged in remotely.

To switch to text-only mode, say

 init 3

To switch to graphical mode, say

 init 5

But, more importantly, post the contents of /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.conf. Experts here may say a lot by looking at their content.

#7

So I figured out “what” is causing my system to lock up. xscreensaver. When it runs, it starts and run’s for a while then the screens go blank and everything stops. I have uninstalled it and now I have not had an issue. Question, why would this have/cause this issue?

Thanks.