I upgraded to OS 18.1 last month. My machine has plenty of space and power. Everything seems to be working OK except once in a while watching a DVD or YouTube video, the OS falls back to the start up screen. Any ideas about what I could check on? I've got Synaptic Package if that helps.
First suspect is heat. Have you been monitoring temperatures?
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Does the computer shut down or does it go into suspend?
If it goes into suspend while watching videos you can take a look at this thread:
Linux often doesn't recognize that the computer is active while watching videos or playing music in background and turns on energy saving functions. To prevent that you can increase the time for going into suspend/blanking screen (or turn it off completely) or use a gnome extension which keeps the computer awake.
You could check Settings>Power and Settings>Privacy>Lock Screen for how they are set up. Maybe make some Screenshots and share it here.
No. Is that function already on the OS 18 or can I find an app in Software?
I don't know. Sometimes the cursor stops working and I have to depress the ON/OFF button to shut it down and start over. Sometimes, it takes me back to the original startup screen where I have to enter my password then it boots up again.
What's the command for exiting Suspend?
With the command sensors you can check the temperatures in terminal. Or you can use psensors, it can be installed with
sudo apt install psensor
Another option if you like to show the values in your taskbar, is to use a gnome extension, e.g.
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Okay, that looks okay. And these Settings were like this, yes? You didn't changed them now?
It does sound like the system is auto locking itself, based on a timer running out, of perceived inactivity. Generally, if the system locks itself, you will then be on the lockscreen. (What you call startup screen)
Real quick, in your system settings, make sure your blank screen is set to "never." Unless your on a notebook and wish to preserve battery, set "automatic suspend" to "never."
Further power saving options can be found in Dconf editor.
Setting power options to "blank," disables them.
It did it again a couple times today. I installed a temp guage on the taskbar and it was around 29C and 33C when it happened (once while I was on this forum). It takes me to the dark blue suspend screen where I have to reenter my password to log back on. Do these temperatures seem excessive to you?
Yes, that's right.
IMO, those temperatures are completely normal when the computer is idling. Here are my computer temps while idling.
That's good to hear. I'm not a gamer but I had a gamer machine built with plenty of storage, RAM and speed. The tower sits in a place where it can breath and I blew the dust out of it last year so it's good to hear it's at an idling temperature while it's being tasked.
Does not sound like overheating, then.
Next guess is that Graphics Stack crashes are shutting things down.
Are you on Wayland or Xorg?
What GPU are you using?
I'll need some help finding this information.
You can open a terminal to make this easy from the app menu or using keyboard shortcut ctl+alt+t
Then paste in for GPU:
sudo lshw -C video
and for the Display Protocol (Wayland or Xorg. Xorg will show as "X11"):
echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
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Okay. Then switch to Xorg as you have an old nvidia card. Logout and at login click on your username then a cog wheal appears at the bottom right corner. There select "Zorin desktop on Xorg".
Test if it works then.
You wrote that you have upgraded - from Zorin 17 or Zorin 18.0?
Have you ever used a proprietary nvidia driver on your computer in Linux? Do you want to use the proprietary drivers? They get no updates.
At the moment you are running the open source driver nouveau. There are more proven options to install nvidia driver 390 in Zorin 17 than in Zorin 18. So if you would like to use them, I'd suggest to stay with Zorin 17. It is still supported.
But test if Nouveau works well when you switch to XOrg. I myself also use Nouveau and have no problems while watching videos (at the moment running Zorin 17 Lite).
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It's been several days since I made the change and no more sliding into Suspend without warning. Thanks team.
It seems to me I have used the proprietary nvidia driver before in Zorin 15 or 16.
I bought this new computer sometime in there.
By the way, that Gnome extention for CPU temp in my task bar is too translusent to easily read and I can't figure out how to make it darker so I can see it.
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