Linux user for many years. Tried many distros over time.

One thing I observed over all distributions as common and it has always bugged the hell out of me, but I never found anything helpful in my researchs. It is the unreliable nature of the monitor power management features.

Every distro I have tried on many different machines has that same problem. Sometimes the screensaver comes on sometimes it doesn't and sometimes the monitors goes into standby, sometimes it doesn't.

Now as a rule, to minimize this intermitent bug I always use the app "xscreensaver" instead of the native tools. It seems to lower the occurances. But it does not solve this problem.

Just this afternoon, on a fresh install of Opensuse 10.2 (4 days) I comme back to see my 2 monitors all bright an shiny. no saver, no stanby. Nothing.

Is there any documented cases of this anyone would know about? Is there somekind of "reset" that could restore the power management without rebooting (rebooting works of course). Some command maybe that could be run hourly as a preventative cron job?

To enable power saving and have your monitor shut off, you need to enable DPMS in your xorg config..
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Automat...f_your_monitor

as for it being intermittent, and working sometimes and not others.. I have not seen that.
See if restarting the acpid daemon makes it start working again..
if that does the trick I guess you could write a watchdog script for the daemon.

Hummm...acpid daemon...good idea...could do the trick. Thanks.

I'll way for the bug to comeback and try restarting it in the services panel.

DPMS as alway enn enabled in my configs so it's not that

xset q
This will display your current settings, pay attention to DPMS. Some media players disable it for obvious reasons and "forget" to reset at exit.
man xset for synopsis what can be set.

Thanks Emerson for reminding me to use "xset"

That media player thing might be my problem.

Just to make sure things keep running fine in the future I wrote a little cron job that run's every 15 minutes like so:

That should make sure the power management stays activated. It's not a fix but a decent workaround.