Screen intermittently goes black

[Joshua Orvis]

This is a completely new build of 13.04 and after package updates the nouveau driver caused the screen to be a checkerboard of white and black squares after each reboot. Instead I installed the nvidia-current drivers and Xorg displayed great, but now the screen often just goes black while working.

This is happening when I had openSUSE installed as well as my current Ubuntu 13.04. This laptop is 3 years old and it has worked wonderfully until now. It's a Dell Precision M6500 and at first I thought it was a hardware issue, and Dell has replaced the motherboard, daughterboard, video card and hard drive, but the same issue is happening.

It has taken at least 10 reboots just to get far enough to file this bug.

The video card info:
$ lspci | grep -i nvidia
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G92GLM [Quadro FX 2800M] (rev a2)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.04
Package: nvidia-settings 304.51-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.8.0-27.40-generic 3.8.13.4
Uname: Linux 3.8.0-27-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.9.2-0ubuntu8.1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Aug 1 09:07:40 2013
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-07-29 (2 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" - Release amd64 (20130424)
MarkForUpload: True
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nvidia-settings
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[emptythevoid (emptythevoid)]

I have a similar problem on my Dell Precision M6500. Runnign 13.04, with binary nvidia driver 331.20. It mostly seems to happen after I've turned the computer on and logged in, OR after waking from suspend. Computer will work for some undetermined length of time (a few seconds to a couple of minutes) and then the screen will go black. The computer seems to still be running, because I can see hdd activity. And when the screen goes blank, even the backlight shuts off. The computer will not repond to REISUB, and the only solution is to use the power button to power it off and back on. Sometimes, after this, it'll freeze one or two more times before becoming usable. It's done this since 12.04.

[emptythevoid (emptythevoid)]

This problem is most definitely caused by faulty hardware. It's either caused by the motherboard, or more likely, the video card. My M6500 has both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 13.10 on it. With the FX2800 card, black screens on boot-up/wake-from-suspend were somewhat frequent, but eventually levelled out after a few reboots, on both Ubuntu and Windows 7. I swapped the FX2800 card with a used FX3800 card and it's *worse*. However, I'm able to use a setting in Xorg to tell the nvidia settings driver to *always* throttle back the power mizer to a lower level, and it works fine in Ubuntu. Windows 7 doesn't have a good way of permenantly setting this, and it goes to the black of death waaay more than it did on the old card.

In any case, it's definitely a hardware problem of some kind, and there is a workaround for it, but it's still crap.