Suspend-to-RAM and NVidia cards: Has anyone fixed the "blank screen" problem?

joe@emenaker.com · *nix forums beginner Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 2

I've got an Inspiron 8600 and I've never been able to use
Suspend-to-RAM on it.

The suspend part works... but, upon resume, the screen never comes
back. It stays black. Keep in mind that I can still type commands at
the keyboard (like "shutdown") and I can ssh into it over the
network.... so the machine is still alive. The only problem is that the
video system is seemingly stuck in the "off" state upon resume.

I've read various web pages regarding this, and some people claim to
have fixed it... but, in their solution, they mention using NVidia's
binary drivers for X, etc. What perplexes me about this is that I get
this problem even when I'm *not* using X. I can boot to a text console,
suspend, resume, and I'll have this same problem. So, I don't see how a
different X driver is going to help me there.

Also, most of the pages I read say that you have to recompile the
kernel (at a minimum) and possibly even apply some patches to some of
the downloaded sources. However, most of these pages are more than a
year old, so I'm hoping that, over the last year, the solutions have
become a little more "plug-n-play" than a kernel recompile.

Also, I have noticed that the Debian package repository has a lot of
new (within the last year or so) goodies that might offer help, like
vbetool, and an NVidia kernel driver (although I don't know what it's
supposed to help with).

So, I ask this to the group. Has anyone out there had this
blank-screen-on-resume problem with their NVidia-based laptop and
solved it? If so, I'd be interested in hearing about what you did.

tomi@home.bengs.de · *nix forums beginner Joined: 08 Mar 2006 Posts: 1

* joe@emenaker.com <joe@emenaker.com> wrote:

Google