Every once in a while (often, but not always, over the weekend) my keyboard and screen "dies". Usually, I will arrive at my office to find the screen blank, and the keyboard unresponsive (no reaction to num-lock etc.). The machine doesn't crash, however; I can ssh to it from another machine, but I am unable to find a process to kill to fix the problem (I tried just killing X, an even that did not help). So far, I've had to simply shut down & reboot every time this happens. This morning offered a variation - instead of a black screen, the "star wars writing" Xscreensaver was displayed (but stalled).
This is generally a bad interaction between the graphics drivers, OpenGL and the graphics hardware. Also generally NVidia specific :-) Make sure you have the latest NVidia drivers installed if this is the case. A good workaround is to either pick a screensaver that doesn't use OpenGL (KDE) or disable all the OpenGL drivers from those that are chosen at random (Gnome).
You're lucky though -- when the driver/hardware combination bit us at work (we all had the same NVidia graphics card) it would generally lock the machine up solid, not even ping could get through. In the distant past though I've had the machine stay responsive but had the graphics hardware lock up so hard I had to disconnect the machine from the power (not just turn it off) in order to reset it. This general problem is, I'm afraid, a symptom of the graphics chip manufacturers having a very aggressive development schedule: new chipsets come out quicker than you would believe possible and things suffer as a result. Well, by things, I generally mean Linux users :-)
jch
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