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I have an older desktop PC that has been running Ubuntu Gnome perfectly for the past 18 months until last week. The last hardware change to the machine was addition of Blutooth via USB about 3 weeks ago.

Starting a few days ago I would leave the machine for some time, half hour or so. When I returned the monitors would come out of sleep and I can move the mouse but both monitors are black.

Today I rebuilt the machine. Same /home directory but formated the system disk and did a fresh install. Unfortunately the problem persists.

I'm not sure if I should threat this as a hardware of software issue and am hoping to get advice for solution or debugging.

System is Dell XPS 8100, 10 years old, i5, 16GB RAM, 500 SSD system disk with /home on 250 SSD. Don't remember what my graphics card is but pretty generic $40 card I purchased 3 or 4 months ago. Ubuntu Gnome 16.04.2 with all updates applied.

Power settings

Blank screen 5 minutes Wi-Fi off Mobile broadband off Automatic suspend off

EDIT Graphics card is

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT218 [GeForce 8400 GS Rev. 3] (rev a2)

Thanks

klequis
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  • Don't remember what my graphics card Sorry but you have to or run lspcito find out, as it is the most likely culprit, not the card itself but eventually a wrong or missing driver. Please [edit] and add that info. –  Jul 25 '17 at 00:10
  • Now that I have the video card make/model I see this post, could try that, and will also note that I'm currently using the 'X.Org X server' driver. I could change the driver but that does not explain why it suddenly developed the problem. – klequis Jul 25 '17 at 00:28
  • The driver is the same -340 - but you can easily enable it in Additional drivers. Already included in the Ubuntu repos. No need to add any PPA. –  Jul 25 '17 at 00:31
  • Both the NVIDIA 340.102 and 304.135 drivers solve the problem. I only did one test on the 304 driver (test: let screen go blank, wait for monitors to sleep, then try to log in). Have been using the 340 drive all day with no problem. – klequis Jul 25 '17 at 16:47
  • @MichaelBay Do you want to write the answer. I'll mark it answered. If not I'll write an answer. – klequis Jul 25 '17 at 16:48

1 Answers1

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The problem is related with nouveau, the default open source driver in use for your Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS card.

The community driver is great mainly because it provides support for a broad range of Nvidia chipset from several different generations, but in some cases the proprietary (closed source) driver from Nvidia is required for better overall performance and particularly games or any other software with similar requirements.

For the GeForce 8400 GS chipset Nvidia recommends the current long term support "legacy" driver: 340.xx.

The driver can be installed using Additional drivers as in the example below:

enter image description here

Source: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia