Pandora freezes when I don't do anything with it

[ekianjo]

I have a OP with the latest 5a firmware, Rebirth edition.


I noticed something very strange over the past few weeks. The Pandora freezes by itself when I leave it, for example on the desktop without any application running. Always after a kind of precise amount of time. Maybe 5 to 10 minutes. It never happens when I play a game or watch a video or do anything with it.


Somehow I feel it is linked to the nubs or the mouse in a wierd way. If I regularly move the mouse with the nubs, for example, it never freezes. But if I don't, it freezes, no mistake.


Is there some kind of underlying process that may cause this, activating itself every x mins ?


Any help would be appreciated.

 

[WizardStan]

That's the screen saver. After 10 minutes, the LCD is supposed to turn off. You can disable this by choosing Settings->LCD Settings->Screen Blanking and disable it.


I suppose it doesn't freeze if you just close the lid? You're not the first person to have this behavior but as far as I can tell no actual solution has been discovered, other than disabling the blanking.

 

[Stainy]

what WS said..


I have to do that too..

 

[ekianjo]

That's the screen saver. After 10 minutes, the LCD is supposed to turn off. You can disable this by choosing Settings->LCD Settings->Screen Blanking and disable it.


I suppose it doesn't freeze if you just close the lid? You're not the first person to have this behavior but as far as I can tell no actual solution has been discovered, other than disabling the blanking.

Thanks - I thought it could be it but I had never seen any screen saver on Pandora before so it has been probably freezing from day 1 without understanding the actual reason


Just by curiosity, why is it freezing when the screensaver starts?

 

[ekianjo]

By the way I tried and it works

 

[Lao Rebel]

this happens to me too. when i leave it for like 5min, it freezes. i had to hard reset. i hope new firmware will solve this.

 

[notaz]

This is extremely annoying, no matter how long I leave my unit it never hangs here, with or without the screensaver. AFAIK ED never had this too.


Can someone of the affected please answer these questions (I already asked in another tread and got answers, but I need more statistical data):

Some questions, when this happens:


- does the screen stay on?


- does it react to plugging SD cards after the hang (do the LEDs blink?)


- if wifi is on, could you try to ping the pandora after the hang? Maybe even ssh into it?


- before the hang, if you open and close the lid several times, does it hang?

And the final that would help me most:

Could you perhaps try running 'sudo chvt 1' (which will switch to tty1) and leaving it there until it hangs? When it hangs, hopefully it will spit out a backtrace (assuming it's a kernel oops) that would help a lot. You could then take a photo or something.

 

[ekianjo]

screen staying on -> yes


react to SD cards -> did not try. I'll try it if it freezes again.


wifi -> when it's frozen I doubt the wifi is still working.


lid -> it happens to me even when the lid of closed. Not sure what hapens if you close and open the lid several times.


sudo -> if I experience freezes again I will try that to get some info.

 

[PowerGod]

It happen always to me, but only with DoomRunner when leaving Doom on pause... but I was thinking it was an issue of that application, so I don't know how can be related..


anyway I didn't had any issue about the screen saver, the display shut down correctly after a while and turn on after a key press

 

[kmork]

I had the problem with a new 512mb version of the Pandora (running SuperZaxxon final).


The problem didn't appear at the beginning, I remember the screen turned black after several minutes and everything still worked.


I must've changed some settings, but I can't say what were the causes for the trouble. One thing was that I


changed the Power Manager settings and voila removing those settings was neccessary:

rm ~/Applications/Settings/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-power-manager.xml

But disabling Screen Blanking as described by WizardStan was also neccessary!


Still, I would like to have some sort of Powermanagement and/or Screensaver.


I'll reflash when I have time to do so.


By the way: Entering Sleepmode by closing the lid worked fine all the time.