Screen Saver

[Ray Parrish]

Mario Vukelic wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-01-09 at 21:52 -0800, Ray Parrish wrote:
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> It's very likely DPMS [1] interfering with Gnome Screensaver. You can
> try to set other DPMS timings (or turn DPMS off) using the xset command,
> and write them into xorg.conf if this indeed turns out to be the
> problem. Here [2] are good in-depth instructions for testing and solving
> it.
>
> Here [3] is a straightforward article about the issue in Feisty, with
> instructions.
>
> The forums have several articles about it, too, but they are down at the
> moment. Here's Google's cache for one of them [4]
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_Display_Power_Management_Signaling
> [2] http://www.shallowsky.com/linux/x-screen-blanking.html
> [3] http://www.ubuntugeek.com/workaround-for-feisty-screensaver-bug.html
> [4]
> http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:xvlGR30YkgYJ:ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-25917.html+dpms+off+ubuntu+xorg.conf&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=de&client=firefox-a
>
>
>   
Well, that was interesting reading. Thank you for your answer, but 
Rashkae had already pointed me at man xset, and I have now learned how 
to disable the blanking which was driving me crazy.

The problem was actually that X has a default setting of 10 minutes for 
blanking the screen, which gnome-screensaver usually overwrites on boot 
up. Somehow, while attempting to disable screen saving with 
gconf-editor, I managed to disable this overwriting, and X took over and 
began blanking the screen after ten minutes.

I have now used the command "xset s off" to disable the timeout value, 
and the screen no longer blanks after ten minutes. I haven't re-booted 
yet, but if it blanks again after a re-boot, I will write a short bash 
script to disable it, and add that to the Session Manager so it gets ran 
at log on. Problem solved!

Later, Ray Parrish

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