At Sun, 1 Jun 2008 13:53:15 +0100, Greg Thomas wrote:

I'm running Ubuntu 8.04, which 95% of the time works just great.

The other 5% if the time, the screen will just go grey when in use [It may actually be black, but with nothing else on the LCD to contrast it against it looks grey], and I'm unable to do anything (*).

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace will rattle the disk, and I can hear the Ubuntu drumbeat that happens when GNOME starts, but nothing actually changes on screen.

I get this occasionally with my Debian sid laptop. It happens with KDM and with GDM.

(And ditto with the 'blind reboot' thing. I have C-A-t set up as a short-cut for starting a terminal. Then I carefully type sudo reboot, carefully type in my password and, after a few moments (the screen remaining blank) it reboots and everything is fine again.)

Ctrl-Alt-F1 will drop me to a command line; restarting gdm from here doesn't do anything other than re-present me with a back/grey screen.

Oo, lucky you! I haven't been able to switch VT via C-A-Fn for ages (years possibly). (I now use a Fluxbox hack for this: I've assigned chvt 1 to C-A-F1.)

So any ideas from the readers as to the best way to restart my windowing environment without restarting the whole box?

'Fraid not. But it's nice to know that someone else gets this too.

Google does bring up quite a few results. They're mainly focused on either: video driver problems; or forcing X to restart after logging out (e.g. AlwaysRestartServer=true in gdm.conf).

Cheers, Richard