hel[ tracking down two pesky problems

[Matt Price]

Hey,

I run Ubuntu Dapper on my Dell Latitude D820, pretty much a vanilla
distro except that I use the suspend2-enabled kernels which can be found
at various places on the net.  

Mostly it works great, but I have a couple of irritating problems with
I'm now ready to try and deal with.  they are:

1) strange screen flickering when screensaver turns on.  When the
screensaver activates, there are 5-10 seconds of flashing light, suring
which the desktop is intermittently visible and can sometimes be seen in
inverted colors (white baps to black, and various other colors undergo
unsettling trnasformations).  About half the time, these colors stay
inverted when I deactivate the screensaver.  

I'm not sure what exactly this bug is related to.  It occurs when I run
either the free nv or the nonfree nvidia drivers, and whether I choose a
blank screen or any of the specificable gnome screensavers.  Any ideas
what kinds of tests I might run to diagnose the problem?

2) some process grabs /dev/dsp when I suspend/resume.  Often (but not
always) when I resume, /dev/dsp becomes unavailable.  At first I thought
this was a driver problem, because there are several bugs in the
intel_hda driver that my sound card uses -- it doesn't like to switch
back and forth between speakers and headphones, and apparently hte
microphone doesn't work that well (haven't tried it).  However, I have
discovered that access to /dev/dsp is usallky resotred if I log out and
log back in again.  SO I assume that some process is
monopolizing /dev/dsp and is hung.  Logging out and in kills the
process, so /dev/dsp is available.  Since ubuntu uses esd by default,
that would be the obvious candidate; but theproblem occurs even when no
instance of esd is running.  

Again, I don't know how to go about diagnosing this.  ANy suggestions?
Is there some way to check whether a device is being accessed by a
process?  

Thanks as usual,

matt

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