Can't Wake Screen or Change Brightness on 19.1

Please post suggestions for improvement of Cinnamon on:
https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon
Forum rules
Before you post read how to get help. Topics in this forum are automatically closed 6 months after creation.
Locked
stellarpower

Can't Wake Screen or Change Brightness on 19.1

Post by stellarpower »

Hi,

I've had a number of issues since upgrading to 19.1, and they're starting to make it a real pain to be in front of my computer which is a great annoyance as I normally spend a lot of time on it and until now Mint has always been a joy.

I had an issue where the kernel updated to a newer version and I could no longer log into a virtual terminal, which is a regression upstream in Ubuntu, my bluetooth fell out completely - after a good while searching for an answer the solution was simply that the service wasn't set to start on boot, there are several other issues that I can't think of off the top of my head but the most annoying two by far are that when the screensaver is activated, I get a black screen that I can't wake, and that the brightness, if change at any point, will keep decreasing itself until the screen goes dark.

I used to have a nice Matrix screensaver, I hear that xscreensaver-hacks have been removed and so this won't be possible anymore, fair enough, but I'm not sure what is meant to be there in its place. I have opened the screensaver settings and there are no options. I have set the screensaver never to come on, and not to lock the system, but what I get left is that I walk out of the room for fifteen minutes, return, and see that my screen is on yet completely black (I can see the backlight still). The only way to wake it, and sometimes this doesn't work at all, is to change virtual terminals backwards and forwards, at which point it sometimes comes back to life. This was annoying previously but recently the keyboard on my laptop has started having errors and I can't type the control key, and also some keys for my password which immediately means I'm pretty buggered. I ordered a replacement wireless keyboard expecting a USB adapter but they sent me a bluetooth one and so now if it times out I can't do anything, fair enough, different issue, but it means I have to go to my flattmate's room at the moment several times a day to borrow his USB keyboard and on several occasions have had to kill the power just because I am physically unable to wake the screen.

On top of this, if ever try to reduce the brightness, which is considerable above about 20% and is giving me eye strain, it will just keep flashing up an indicator on the screen and decreasing it until it hits 0% and I can't see anything. This makes it all the more difficult to unlock the screen as I have had times previously when the brightness has hit zero and then the screen has locked and resultantly I can't get the brightness-up event to go through to the system. Monitoring D-Bus it looks as if a key press is being handled, as if the brightness keys had been simulated themselves.

I have dual graphics changed by a hardware switch whilst booted into Windows. I've had problems with both the nouveau and the nvidia drivers when the graphics card is on, so I have just left it off for now and am using the internal HD graphics 530.

Could anyone provide me with some advice on how I could diagnose these problems please? I submitted a bug report about the brightness problem last July and am yet to have a reply to it, and as for the screensaver, I don't really know where to start searching for the bug.

Thanks very much
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
stellarpower

Re: Can't Wake Screen or Change Brightness on 19.1

Post by stellarpower »

Small update, if I call cinnamon-screensaver-command --activate directly, it works as expected and as I used to remember on 18.3.
Locked

Return to “Cinnamon”