Monitor goes into sleep mode when starting - Ubuntu

[jwatne]

More information on the bug at least one other person and I are experiencing may be found on the Ubuntu forums at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1224690. When I start Nexuiz, my monitor goes into sleep mode - the screen goes blank, and the power button's light changes from the power-on green to the sleep mode yellow. It is an old Gateway FPD1810 flat screen.

Operating System: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, though I have had this problem for at least the last couple Ubuntu releases (Jaunty and Intrepid), but I used to be able to play Nexuiz without this problem a couple years ago. I had fixed a couple problems that arose with the upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic, so thought I would see if I could get this working again, as well.

Nexuiz version: 2.5.2, using the full download from Sourceforge.net. However, I also had this problem using the older version in the Ubuntu repositories downloaded using the Synaptic package manager. The problem occurs with both the glx and sdl versions, though the sound was much less choppy using the sdl version.

Graphics card and driver info:

Code: Select all

john@UBUNTU-DESKTOP:~$ lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R200 QL [Radeon 8500 LE]

To avoid various problems with 3D effects in Karmic that can arise using the proprietary ATI display driver, documented in several spots in the Ubuntu forums, I followed the instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver and made sure that it is not installed.

I do not have an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file; to quote from the link above, "From Ubuntu 7.10 and onwards, the driver and server autodetect most settings. You can often just take away your xorg.conf and it will run fine."

I am running GNOME. The problem occurs whether I use compiz or metacity; I had hoped switching from compiz to metacity using the Compiz Fusion Icon would have solved the problem, but no such luck.

Here are the results of attempting to run nexuiz-linux-glx.sh: http://paste2.org/p/596326

Here are the results of attempting to run nexuiz-linux-sdl.sh: http://paste2.org/p/596330

I don't know if this is Ubuntu- or GNOME-specific, but if anyone has encountered this before and knows a workaround, I would love to hear it. Thanks in advance for your help!

[Ed]

It sounds like what might happen if you are asking the monitor to display something out of range. Many monitors do now have an 'out of range' message but not all. You could refer to your monitors documentation to see what it's out of range behaviour is.

What resolution are you running the desktop at? Nexuiz by default will try 800x600 initially. You could try running Nexuiz from the command line and appending '-window' to see if running Nexuiz in window mode allows the screen to be displayed properly. You could then try editing ~/.nexuiz/config.cfg and setting (or adding) vid_width and vid_height to different values to see if other resolutions start OK.

[jwatne]

Thanks, Ed. That did it!

I am running my display at 1280 x 1024. I went with the 832 x 624 width and height options, and the game loaded just fine. It is awfully slow, given the age of my machine, but I can try simplifying settings as much as possible within the game now to optimize what little performance my computer has to offer.

This reminds me of similar problems I had with my first attempts to install linux, when the display would do weird flickering when I tried using a default 640 x 480 setting. When I boosted the X11 settings to use a higher resolution, it displayed just fine.

Thanks again!