This question was asked on a different thread about using the inhibit function -- which was the closest I could find -- but I am making a new thread because what I need is the opposite.

My Gnome screensaver doesn't work, although it once did.

I have searched for a solution to this problem but no luck. I am running FC 11 and out-of-the-box gnome. At first the screensaver worked normally, shutting off the screen after 5 mins. Now it does not do so. I found the following command line suggestion in the forums, and it looks like it may point to a problem -- the screensaver is inactive, but how to make it active? I may be misunderstanding the term inactive, of course. Logically, the screensaver would have to be inactive if I am typing a command. In any case, the query command shows:

home/rdn% gnome-screensaver-command --query
The screensaver is inactive
The screensaver is not inhibited

Just in case the screensaver really was not running, I tried this command (which I found in another post):

home/rdn% killall -CONT gnome-screensaver

But the query returns the same thing as before.

The only thing I can think of that might be an issue is that using the "appearances" background facility I added a couple dozen pictures that I thought I might use as screen background. Not long after that I discovered that my screen did not go black after 5 mins as expected. Not sure this correlation has any causal meaning, however. I then tried various things, finally returning to the plain (blue) default. That seemed to fix it for a short while, then after a couple of days, the bad or non-behavior returned -- the screensaver does not work.
(update -- I removed all the extra background pics and it makes no difference.)

Any help will be appreciated. My system runs all the time, but I don't want the screen to be on all the time.

Roger

How about using the Power Management & putting the Display to sleep after some scheduled inactivity?

Check the screen saver settings

I appreciate both efforts to help, but I had done those things. In the meantime I did find a partial solution -- and it was *hardware* related. To be thorough, I decided to unplug the monitor from the workstation and then re-insert the connector.
This resulted in the screensaver turning off the display as expected, so the problem was partly solved. What remains a problem is that the backlight does stay on, even though the power management is set to turn off the display after an interval (10 mins). So the LED display and most of the brightness of the picture is off (my screen-saver setting is a blank screen) but there is a faint glow due to the backlight. In previous incarnation, this faint glow was also off.
Thanks, Roger

Appreciate the feedback.

Cheers.