Inspiron 7500 "freezes" when screen blanks

b3

Still need to do a bit of research on this one myself, but I thought I'd lay a feeler out here in case someone else has run into this.

Started my new job yesterday, which also endowed me with an Inspiron 7500. Given time constraints at work, I installed the Win2K side of things there, but since I'll be using this machine day-in and day-out, I want to get Gentoo on it. Took it home last night to get started.

Went into the bios, and disabled all auto-suspend and auto-sleep options...didn't want anything coming back to bite.

Booted Knoppix first to get an idea of what modules I'd need. Took some notes, and rebooted from the Gentoo CD. Decided to take things easy and start off with a Stage 3, and go back to do a Stage 1 when I have the time.

Got partitioned, chrooted, and untarred from the Stage 3 tarball just fine. Sync'd up, and updated Portage. Then ran the emerge -u system.

This seems to run OK, until the system decides to blank the screen, turn off the backlight, and go into a coma from which it will not wake, short of manual power-cycling. I'm at a bit of a loss. I'm not certain if it's stopping completely at this point, or if it's just screenblanking - but no mouse/keyboard input will wake it, nor will any fancy power-button pressing (like my old Vaio used to need).

As I said, I need to research a bit further, but does anyone have any ideas as to what may be the root cause of this - or even better, how to fix it?

green sun · Guru Joined: 04 Nov 2002 Posts: 325 Location: Wista, MA

In the BIOS turn off all PM stuff. Poke around & you will find some info on it, but I have an Inspiron 8100 & had to do the exact same thing. If I remember correctly, you can build the kernel to do screen blanking, but you have to turn it off in the BIOS. In my BIOS I have all PM options off.

Its a Dell thing & documented somewhere...

b3 · Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2003 10:11 pm Post subject:

Indeed. I seem to have warded it off, at least partially, by disabling APM and enabling ACPI in the kernel. Only (slight) issue is that it doesn't turn the backlight off when the screen blanks anymore -- but it does seem to come *back* after the screen blank, which is a definite improvement.