Hello. I apology in advance if I am not reporting things correctly, but my knowledge about these things is very limited.
I have five Transtec computers, approximately born in July 2005; they have an intel 82845G video card.
The last 'yum update' was on January 30, 2014. I did not reboot the machines at that time. I cannot be sure about the date of the 'yum update' preceding that one, but I think is was on September 7, 2013.
Last Friday (February 14, 2014), 4 of those 5 computers stopped working properly after some action on them.
The problem is: black screen with only the arrow of the mouse (mouse is working correctly :-). Apart from that, the computers are OK: one can use Ctrl-Alt-F1, etc.
For sure, one of the action which led to the problem was a reboot. I cannot be 100% sure about the action, which was simply a change of screen: the machine was OK; then I changed the screen; it did not work any more; then I rebooted. But my experience is that, sometimes, even under normal condition, it does not work right away, or perhaps not at all, after changing the screen.
The 5th computer, on which nothing has been done, is still working just fine.
NB: for sure, there has been at least one reboot on at least one of the 5 machines between September (or whatever date at which the previous 'yum update' has been performed) and January, and the problem did not show up.
For what it's worth, the following 2 packages are installed:
xorg-x11-drv-intel-devel-2.21.12-2.el6.i686 xorg-x11-drv-intel-2.21.12-2.el6.i686
Also, here is the output of 'lspci | grep 82845':
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE/PE DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 01) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01)
Based on the data, my best guess is that the problem I have is due to some recent change in the centos packages. Perhaps it was supposed to be so? (I.e., no longer supporting old hardware?). If so, at any rate, I'll be grateful if someone can suggest a workaround, or perhaps a hint towards that goal.
Regards, Alain