[Solved] Mint 19 Mate: Screen goes to sleep and never wakes up

[somelurker]

Mint 19 has been giving me numerous problems. Unfortunately, I had no choice but to upgrade to it on one computer because its hardware was too new to be supported by Mint 18.3.

One of these problems involves the display. Whenever I leave the screen alone for too long, it turns completely black and will not respond to any kind of command except the power button: I have to forcefully power the computer off. The only workaround I've found is to set the display to never go to sleep.

Is there a better fix for this bug?

[karlchen]

Hello, somelurker.

I vaguely remember that Mate screensaver would not manage to wake up my monitor here, either, once it had decided to go to sleep after the configured timeout had been exceeded.
I used Mate Tweak in order to tell Marco to make use of Compton. So it is Marco (Compton+GPU Composit) here now. And my monitor goes to sleep and wakes up again as can be expected.
~~
By the way, I did not have to hard reboot my machine when the monitor remained black after (not) returning from sleep. I pressed <Ctr><Alt><Backspace>, which restarted the graphical environment and returned me to the graphical welcome screen.

HTH,
Karl

[somelurker]

Did you ever find out the reason such a fundamental part of the operating system is broken? Sleep seems like a very basic function to not work properly. This issue is driving me nuts. I can't go back to Mint 18, because it doesn't support my Wi-Fi or sound. On Mint 19, though, I can't even put my computer to sleep. I really don't want to go back to Windows over this one remaining major problem.

I tried Ctrl + Alt + Backspace, but it didn't bring back the monitor. Where would I get this Mate Tweak you mentioned? Is it available in official repositories, or do I have to get it elsewhere?

Update: I just installed the mate-tweak package from official repositories, set the Window Manager to Marco (Compton GPU Compositor, and tried suspend again. My system still won't wake up. The fan appears to turn on, but the display doesn't come back from the black screen.

[all41]

Sleep seems like a very basic function to not work properly.

Especially when considering most garden variety Win pc's can do this easily.

[somelurker]

All Googling on this issue turned up nothing directly helpful, so I experimented out of desperation. I found a workaround, but it unfortunately requires using software that's not open source: the video driver. I don't do gaming on this operating system, or anything that requires heavy graphical work, so I prefer nouveau to the Nvidia driver. However, my system can only wake up on the Nvidia driver right now. I installed the Nvidia driver using the Driver Manager app. Now that I've narrowed down the source of the problem, is there a way I can get the system to wake up properly while using the nouveau video driver? All help would be appreciated!

[carum carvi]

Somelurker, great that you found the culprit of your suspend problem. But if the problem is fixed with installing Nvidea driver, why do still you wanna use the nouveau driver? What particular problem(s) does Nvidea cause?

As far as I know, generally speaking there are 3 possible solutions that could work for people with suspend problems:

1 Changing the video driver
2 Fiddling with the network drivers (viewtopic.php?f=46&t=274817&start=20#p1509414 )
3 Changing kernel

Option 3 is not possible for you with your new hardware. Option 1 did work, but is not your favorite choice? Leaves you with option 2: you could try out the solution gm10 offered in the link above regarding the network drivers.

[somelurker]

I guess you're right; getting suspend to work is probably as much as I should ask for right now with Mint 19 being so new. I had to trudge through numerous problems with Mint 19 when I first installed it. Mint 18 was a far more positive experience for me, but I had no choice in the matter because so much of my hardware was not supported by Mint 18.

I looked at the post you linked to, but it's not clear what the solution would entail even if those 2 commands successfully allowed the system to wake up. I'd rather not spend any more time fiddling with the system because it's working for now, and future updates (e.g. Mint 19.1 may bring further changes that render the fiddling moot anyways).

I want to thank everyone who replied here. I'm marking this topic solved.

[karlchen]

Hi, somelurker.

Congratulation on solving your issue.
Very interesting that you had to switch from nouveau to the proprietary NVidia driver software. My Zotac box has got an (ancient) NVidia graphics chip as well. And I have been using nouveau exclusively ever since Mint 18, very likely since Mint 17.
The crucial little factor will be the exact NVidia graphics chip, which a system has got.
Anyway. You have solved the issue. And this is what counts.

Cheers,
Karl

[somelurker]

I have another system that has the exact opposite problem: I once tried to install the Nvidia driver (a few years ago), and it made my system unbootable. At the time, I didn't know about TimeShift, and I didn't know another way to recover from the problem, so I never dared tried Nvidia drivers again. I had to erase everything and start over from scratch to get back to Nouveau. This time though, I did know about Timeshift, and not having a functional system was interfering with my work so I was willing to take some risk.

I know how to recover from failed kernel upgrades without resorting to TimeShift. I can just use the boot menu and choose the older kernel, then uninstall the problematic kernel. But to this day I still don't know how to recover from a failed graphics driver installation in any other way. Can you undo the graphics driver installation without TimeShift? I'm thinking boot from Live USB, then maybe uninstall the package. But how would I get the terminal to act on the packages in the installed version of Mint instead of on the live USB's files? Perhaps with chroot?

[carum carvi]

Somelurker, that is a good question. I have experienced exactly the same problems with Nvidea driver when I first installed LinuxMint18 and also with 19. Both times I had to do a hard shut down by disconnecting the power. Afterwards I needed to do a totally new install, because just as you I didnt know how to acces the OS without my grahpics working.

Maybe you can post this as a new thread Somelurker? You have just added [SOLVED] to the suspend issue question. Not many will react to this thread anymore now.

HOW TO ACCES and change graphics drivers on the installed OS from within a live usb is a very good question. I would like to know the answer to that question as well...

[somelurker]

That's a good point. Strictly speaking, the original problem was indeed solved, or at least worked around, so I'll just let the topic end here. It would be nice to get nouveau working as well, but I honestly don't have the time to deal with another reinstall right now should something go wrong. I may open a new topic if I have the time, though it might not be for a while. If you have an urgent need to get the problem resolved, you are probably the better person to open the topic.

I tried testing a video driver change for you in a virtual machine, but sadly, I couldn't get past "Applying changes...".

[carum carvi]

I may open a new topic if I have the time, though it might not be for a while. If you have an urgent need to get the problem resolved, you are probably the better person to open the topic.

Somelurker, I will do that. Especially for future use with friends or family of mine who could encounter the same problem with that darn Nvidea video driver. Still nice to read that you got LM19 working alright afterall. Have fun with it. I have posted a link to the new topic below:

viewtopic.php?f=90&t=283635#p1566589

[somelurker]

I hope you find a solution! It was days of utter frustration for me. I had already installed Mint 18 on the system before I found out why Wi-Fi wasn't working. Even then I planned to work around the problem by compiling a driver for it, but then I realized sound was broken as well. At that point I gave up and reinstalled Mint 19, which I had never before tried on any system. I then had to wade through numerous intractable problems which I fortunately worked through with the help of this community.

Now that I have things working properly, I hope you understand why I don't want to risk losing it all again. All those minor problems added together have cost me at least a week already.