Screen blanking / blacking randomly

[record_warper]

Hi everyone,

First time poster.

I made the move to install Fedora 10 back in December to be dual-booted with Vista, which was working really well, absolutely loving Linux and only dropping into Windows to play games and watch Blu-ray discs.

However, about a month ago I started experiencing problems with my display while running Linux. At seemingly random intervals the display will turn completely black for about 1 - 2 seconds and then return to normal. The monitor itself is not turning off; the best way I can describe it is it's like when under Windows I have either installed or reinstalled display drivers, and when rebooted the screen will blank a few times as it's finalising settings. However, it's permanently happening randomly under Linux with seemingly no correlation to anything the computer it actually doing; sometimes it wont happen for a while and then it will blank rapidly for ages. The strangest thing (I think) is that whilst installing from either the liveCD or DVD the display is perfectly fine, so possibly it's after the Nvidia drivers are installed that this problems occurs.

I am experiencing no problems at all under Windows so I assume the actual graphics card is OK.

For information, the computer I am running is a stock Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pi3630 the Q8200 / 1TB / Nvidia 9600GT version (I would post a link to the computer but I haven't made 15 posts or more).

I've posted this in the SuSE forum as I have tried various distributions; Fedora 10 and 11, Zenwalk, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and now openSUSE and within them the GNOME and KDE desktops - they all give me the exact same problem.

I have only been using Linux since December so my ability to diagnose this problem is somewhat lacking and was really hoping somebody could shed some light on this for me.

Thanks guys.

[gogalthorp]

Since the problem happens with all the listed distros and you say all is ok with the default drivers I'd guess a problem with the NVIDIA driver. But I have never heard of this before. You could drop back to a generic driver (you would not have 3D acceleration) and see if the problem goes away. To drop back press CTRL-ALT-F1 to get to a terminal. log in as root type

init 3 to shut down X (the GUI)

edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file

joe /etc/X11/xorg.conf

change driver "nvidia" line to "nv" or "vesa"
save and exit
then type
init 5 to restart Xwindows (the GUI)

run for a while like that to see if the problem shows up if it does not then you know it is a NVIDIA driver problem. You also might report the problem on the NVIDIA form