monline

Yesterday I've experienced something on my thin client for the first time: the screen froze, but the box was still running. I had lock ups previously, but then I could not ping it or ssh into the client. To cut things short: it ran out of memory and the kernel killed Xorg completely to keep things running.

X has a "-reset"/"-noreset" option which controls whether the X server should reset itself after the last client exits (aka. user logs off) or not. This feature has been introduced long ago to come up for the various memory leaks that are present in X. The default behaviour is to do this self-reset and it is good so. However if you use the NSC driver on a Compaq Evo T20, then sometimes upon such a reset the video mode is not set properly. X starts up OK, but you get only a blank screen to see. I've found two solutions for the problem.

If you're using Ubuntu Feisty (eg. with LTSP-5) on a Compaq Evo T20, then you've probably already noticed that the NSC driver fails to load. The problem occurs only with the latest (2.8.2) version. Reverting back to v2.8.1 fixes it. Here's how to do that ...