Screen Saver

[Ray Parrish]

Mark H. Nichols wrote:
> On Jan 9, 2009, at 11:52 PM, Ray Parrish wrote:
>
>   
>> Rashkae wrote:
>>     
>>> Ray Parrish wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Nice suggestion, but since I used Synaptic Package Manager to  
>>>> completely
>>>> remove gnome-screensaver, and every other screensaver related  
>>>> package on
>>>> my system, that file doesn't exist anymore. Thanks for trying to  
>>>> help. I
>>>> have rebooted after doing the removals, and for some mad reason my
>>>> screen still blanks after ten minutes.
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> Blanks, your screen blanks?  We've been going around in circles  
>>> looking
>>> for a screensaver (let's be clear, a screensaver, at least, one that
>>> uses any kind of screensaver program, displays pretty graphics on  
>>> your
>>> screen).
>>>
>>> So please, clarify, do you see a 'screensaver' or does your screen  
>>> blank?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>> I had the screen saver interface set to use the "blank only" setting
>> instead of actually running a graphic screen saver. Someone else
>> suggested that it was actually power management doing the blanking,  
>> and
>> told me how to shut that off, and I already have tried that with no  
>> joy.
>>     
>
> When I was a programmer I frequently ran across problems where one  
> bug masked another.  After reading all the messages in this thread  
> the question that occurs to me is, what else did you do with or to  
> your computer either just before exploring the screen saver  
> offerings, or just after that exploration?
>
> In other words, is it possible that something unrelated to the screen  
> saver or the energy saving settings is causing your screen to blank?
>
> You've pretty well eliminated the screen saver feature from being the  
> issue.  What else did you do about that time that could be the cause?
>   
>> This is really puzzling me. I've never had software disobey me before.
>> It usually does exactly what you tell it to do, at least it always did
>> in Winbloze.
>>     
>
> The software *is* doing what you told it to do.  The trick is to step  
> back from what you think is the root cause and consider those things  
> that, while unlikely, may be the root cause.
>
> Mark
>
>   
Thanks for your answer, and you are right, as another person on here had 
me look at the man for xset, and it turns out X by default will blank 
the screen after 10 minutes of inactivity. According to the same person, 
while attempting to turn screen saving off, my use of the gconf editor 
to change some settings related to screen saving, somehow stopped 
gnome-screensaver from overwriting the X server's default setting of 10 
minutes at boot up, and that started the problem.

I'm not sure which setting in gconf-editor caused it, as I haven't had 
time to look through it yet again, but by looking through man xset, I 
was able to determine the command to use to set X's blank screen setting 
to 0 which disables it.

I'm a programmer too, and believe software should be written to 
co-operate with the system it's on. In this case evidently, gconf-editor 
overrides something which gnome-screensaver depends on to enforce it's 
settings, which I had set to not use any blanking. Since I didn't know 
that X had a setting to blank the screen as well, I spun my wheels for 
nearly two days trying to find out why the screen saver wouldn't shut 
off, and it turned out to not even be the screen saver. 8-)

Later, Ray Parrish

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