Laptops with gnome black screened when using external monitors

Symptoms:

• plug in external monitor and boot laptop into linux with Gnome, causes black screen on laptop making it difficult to enter password for the start screen as you can't see whats going on and password prompt does not appear on the external monitor screen.
• plug in external monitor while logged into linux with Gnome, causes laptop screen to go black and nothing happens on external monitor... Unplugging external monitor does not turn laptop screen back on.
• closing the laptop lid to make the laptop go into sleep mode while external monitor is connected, cause black screen when opening laptop lid again waking it up from sleep mode.
• using dedicated brightness control buttons does not resolve any of above problems.
• trying to unplug external monitor, put laptop into sleep mode and then waking it up again, does not resolve any of above problems.

I always end up "resolving" the problem by killing my laptop with the physical off switch and rebooting. But I am getting a bit tired of this since I risk loosing work and it feels a little abusive to the poor laptops to brutally switch them off like that (I guess its unhealthy for the hardware and the file system in general to do that).

Is there a simple way to get the screen back when it goes black?

Can I setup something in Gnome such that the problems does not occur?

Any recommendations for linux desktop/window managers that work reliable with external monitors and laptops?

* With screen going black, I mean everything is running fine, its just the light in the laptop screen that gets turned off and is impossible to turn on again unless I reboot.

* I am using Debian stable.

Solution 1:

I'm also on Debian stable (Jessie) with Gnome3.

I was having the same problem. I fixed it by going to: Settings -> Power :: Power Saving -> Screen Brightness

It was all the way at zero so no wonder my screen was going black. Additionally, I turned "Dim screen when inactive" to off, as possibly that has something to do with it but I'm not sure. Just glad I've got my laptop screen back.

On a side note, instead of powering off your laptop when something like this happens, I would do: alt + ctrl f2, which should exit you into a new virtual terminal. Then from the command line I log in and type sudo shutdown now to power off correctly.

Usually just alt + F[1-9] will switch virtual terminals, so from another virtual terminal just alt + f key will work, but when a window manager is active, you have to add ctrl in there for the keybinding to register as such.

UPDATE TO ANSWER: My comments about using tty for shutdown isn't definetely relative for your issue. The problem is probably addressed by now with an update to gnome, but when this was an issue for me, the way to fix it was altering my laptops screen brightness through the command line. I did so at the time with the following command, althought the command may be different for you. What it does is set the screen brightness, and if your screen is black, its worth trying because it may be black because of a software glitch as it was for me. Remember that the command may be different depending on your hardware. For my laptop the command to force my brightness all the way up was:

echo $1000 > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness