Re: X crashes, black screen (video signal still there), and have to shutdown and power up.

It sounds like a software problem, but X crashes so hard and I have to
power off the system to fix my X?

This can be a bug in the driver for your card, but it could also be a
harware bug.

I don't think it is heat either because I turned the box off for 15
minutes, powered back on, and still crashes (reproduced).

Does your card have a fan? Is the fan spinning? Some 5200 doesn't have a
fan, but some cards do have a fan. You might not need a fan, but a fan
standing still generates heat.

Yep, it has a fan. I will have to check to see if it still spins. However, the card is like a
few months old. Also, I can reproduce the problem at the same exact place now. I don't think
that's heat related if it is consistent.


Is there a bug in X (x.org v1:7.0.22) or something I don't know about?

Don't blame the bug on X.org unless you are using their driver. You have 3
drivers to choose from:

The binary driver from nVidia which has support for accelerated 3D.
The opensource nv driver which only suppports accelerated 2D.
The opensource vesa driver which is rather slow.

Interesting. I didn't know there were three options. I always there were only two.


If you suspekt the driver the easiest way to test this is to change to
another driver. If the problem goes away it might be because of a bug in
the driver or because of a bug in a part of the hardware that only the
problematic driver uses.

Please note that I can't reproduce the problem in Gnome, but I do see corrupted texts. I think
KDE can't handle it or something.



If you suspect hardware you could try to replace your card with another
5200 and see if that helps. However, that assumes that you have another
5200 card that you can borrow. A simple hardware test to run is memtest86
which will find RAM errors.

Yeah, I will see if it is the card or not. I doubt it is. Doubt it is memory. Wouldn't I have
problems in other places.
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