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Re: [LUG] blank sreen

 

On Thursday 07 June 2007 21:17, james kilty wrote:
> Hello
> My wife borrowed my laptop and physically closed it. Everything is blank
> and I can neither switch it off nor show the desktop. It seems to be
> chuntering on in the background. Obviously once I get it going again, I
> will obviously have to find the settings that determine what happens
> when it is closed and change it. Meanwhile, how do I show the screen?
>

Quite possibly you can't...

What I suspect has happened is that when the lid was closed, the laptop tried 
to suspend or hibernate but failed. I had a Dell laptop which used to get 
into this state, where it had switched the screen off before going into 
suspend but then suspend failed and it didn't reinitialise the display.

If the machine itself is still working and not in some crashed state then you 
may be able to get into it via SSH or maybe VNC if desktop sharing is enabled 
(that's presuming it's on a network). Failing that, your best option is to 
switch to a console (Ctrl+Alt+F1), log-in, then type 'poweroff' so you at 
least get a clean shutdown.

If it's crashed and the power button isn't working, you'll have to remove the 
battery to kill it.

HTH,
David.

-- 
David Johnson
www.david-web.co.uk

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