dpms troubles with GeForce2Go

[zeeman]

I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop with a GeForce2Go card.
Over the years the dpms has worked on and off with various kernel/X/driver versions, and for the last several months has been fairly erratic.

With the 8174 drivers (and gentoo kernel 2.6.11-gentoo-r11, and xorg 6.8.2 gentoo r6) things seem to have settled to a broken consistency. If I use xscreensaver to set the dpms settings to power off the display, the screen will blank at the appropriate time, but the backlight never goes off. If I use:

xset dpms force off

then the display blanks and the backlight goes off, but then about a minute later the backlight comes on again.
If X is started with: startx -- -logverbose 5 -verbose 5
then the following message appears both in the log file and on the console about once every 55 seconds:

GetModeLine - scrn: 0 clock: 122000
GetModeLine - hdsp: 1400 hbeg: 1488 hend: 1640 httl: 1880
vdsp: 1050 vbeg: 1052 vend: 1064 vttl: 1082 flags: 5

If I close the lid, then the display will go completely off, but it doesn't come back on without changing to another vt and back.

Any help out there?

[bck]

Surprised you got no replies. I've had similar problems and I know others who had similar problems, including with I8100 (I have Latitude d800) - but maybe not exactly the same. We have always managed to find a solution, just by poking around. Make sure you have option "DPMS" in your xorg monitor section. nvidia drivers behave differently: 7667 and 8xxx seem to work fine. Lots of complicated possibilities for external override from kde or powersaved, maybe, but keep poking.

[cyberjun]

Hi,
I have also observed these things and have narrowed them down to xscreensaver. The symptom zeeman describes about the display coming back on after a min or so automatically even after switching it off with "xset dpms force off" was observed by me also. Now try to kill the xscreensaver server process (ensure that it is indeed dead by ps-aef | grep xscreensaver) and attempt to switch off the display again. I am pretty sure this time it will remain off.

I have uninstalled xscreensaver since there is no specific need for it as this is my home laptop. Since then the only bothersome things are:

1. Mediaplayer disengages DPMS as soon as it is launched and doesn't restore the previous settings.

2. Sometimes the screen doesn't go off even if I have dpms enabed (confirmed with "xset q"). In those cases I reset it with "xset dpms 0 0 600" and it starts working.

All these observations make me believe that the nvidia driver is working (since the screen can be turned off completely with "xset dpms force off") atleast in my case. The versions I am using are:

1. nvidia driver 8178 (even 8174 worked. 7xxx could switch off the display but had to do VT console switch to get the display back)
2. gentoo kernel 2.6.14
3. Gnome 2.12.1
4. xorg-x11 6.8.2-r6
5. lspci : 0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34M [GeForce FX Go5200] (rev a1)

hope this helps.

cheers,
--cyberjun