How can I just turn off the screensaver and auto-suspend?

[Michael V. De Palatis]

On Sat, Jul 29, 2006 at 01:01:47AM +0800, Atrus Qiao wrote:
> Hi everyone.
> 
>  I've just installed Xubuntu 6.06 on my second-hand laptop Toshiba 490xcdt
> with Pentium II 266 CPU, 96MB Ram and a S3 virge MX+ Video Card. (You know,
> a student usually can't afford some good hardwares) I have to say
> that Xubuntu is cool and fast enough for me.
> 
>  But not all the things go well. When I try to start X with its s3virge
> driver, my computer hangs. I'd tried lots of distributions before but none
> of them seems to work(FreeBSD, NetBSD, even Gentoo compiled by myself). So I
> ended it up by using vesa driver, thus my system lacks 3d acceleration. I
> wanna trun the ScreenSaver off, But I cannot find the app to configure this.
> Is it OK to just uninstall all the packages related to "screensaver"? I mean
> is this too rude to the system...
> 
> Another one is that when I close my laptop's LCD display, the system will
> automatically suspend. But in most of the cases I want my computer to
> perform some kind of work (say, calculating the molecular dynamics) without
> leave it's LCD widely open. I can't find any kind of Power Management
> Setting anywhere. So how can I turn this off?

I'm not sure which screensaver xubuntu uses (my guess is
xscreensaver). If xscreensaver is it, you can just set the screensaver
to be a blank screen. Just run xscreensaver-demo and select "Blank
screen only" as the mode.

In modern terms, screensavers are hardly necessary anymore. Modern
monitors will not get ruined if a screensaver doesn't activate. The
main reasons they still exist is because (a) some of them are pretty,
and (b) it gives some limited amount of privacy/security when you're
away from your computer for a little bit (i.e., you can use the
screensaver to lock your machine).

Hope that helps,

Mike