[wplug] My computer is going slightly insane

[Mackenzie Morgan]

I don't know when it started as I've been away at school until May, but
probably 5 times this summer I've walked over to my computer and the monitor
was in suspend (ok sure...normal if it's been a while), but moving the mouse
doesn't bring anything back.  The "any" key doesn't work either.  Dropping
to a virtual terminal wakes the monitor back up, but all I see is...well, a
mess.  It looks like Thursday night when Ted demo'd what happens when you
cat /dev/urandom and let it go so long the terminal corrupts.  When he did
that though, he fixed it with the reset command.  That doesn't help in this
case.  It redraws the mess.   The terminal can still, technically, be used,
provided you don't make a typo.  Usually I'd hit the power button and force
shut down then turn it back on, but this time I tried actually logging in
and sending "sudo reboot" which worked so yay for not potentially hurting
things with forced shutdowns.

Distro:  Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty)
Kernel: 2.6.20

I've been bugging some IRC channels, and now I'm bugging you, but here's
things I've been asked or had suggested as the cause:
Q1: ATI graphics with fglrx driver?
A1: No, it's Intel graphics, and old ones at that (so no, the new X3000/i965
thing that's a bit tricky isn't in here)
Q2: Funky ACPI interrupts from a hardware suspend button?
A2: I don't have a hardware suspend button, so I doubt it
Q3: Power management settings for suspend or hibernate with poorly supported
hardware?
A3: It's all very generic hardware, and suspend/hibernate are disabled
Q4: Anything weird in kern.log or /var/log/messages?
A4: Not that I see.  kern.log has absolutely no events registered between
around 10 AM and when I rebooted it at 6:13 PM, and the last user logged out
at 5:05 PM, and /var/log/messages just has 3 lines of - - MARK - - between
those times.

The most reasonable suggestion I've had so far was failing hardware.  I
think my onboard graphics could be going (but very slowly) since for the
last 2 or 3 years weird things would sometimes happen.  On Windows that
meant I'd suddenly have 640x480 for a resolution and it'd be in 8-bit
color.  On Ubuntu, that means it acts like someone's playing with the width
button on the bottom of the monitor because it sorta shrinks in about 20px
on each side and then back to normal, and squish, normal, etc repeatedly for
a couple seconds.

Could failing hardware cause this, and would the graphics card be critical
enough to do it, or should I start worrying about my HDD or some other
important part?  If it's not likely to be hardware, what else could cause
it?

Thanks for any help, guys.

-- 
Mackenzie Morgan
Linux User #432169
ACM Member #3445683
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com <-my blog of Ubuntu stuff
apt-get moo
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