Hello,

I'm a rookie, not quite a newbie. I have turned off all power saving functionality but my screen blanks out instead of the screen saver running. I have tried different saves all with the same result.

I's SuSe 10.1 as bad as I am reading is some of the posts?


Mark S.
Amarillo, TX

Seen this before in Fedora but never could figure out why it happened. To get around this I did the following and was using KDE as gui.
Disable screensaver from the KDE control panel
Now open a terminal window and run the command ' xscreensaver & '
Quickly click on the settings tab and setup as needed.
If I remember when you test one and come back the settings screen is gone. Open a second terminal window and use the command ' xscreensaver-demo ' and go back to modifing.
When done I add ' xscreensaver & ' to my /etc/rc.loca file. This may only apply to Redhat and Redhat clone distros. You may have to create a new service for it or add to an existing service that is running.

Brian1

This bugged me for a long time also, but I recently figured out what was causing it. It's the monitor power-saving support in X. You can turn it off with the command "xset -dpms" (and on again with "xset +dpms"). See man xset for more options. To make it permanent, edit your xorg.conf file and remove the dpms entry from the monitor section.

Of course, I could be wrong and you might be experiencing some other problem instead.

I would give David the H. idea a try first. I would like to know if that would work as well. Such an easy fix.

Brian1

my suse 10.1 did the same thing and I tried many of the workarounds but not until I updated did it start working..
Goodluck,
jolphil

My issues seemed to be with KDE 3.5.2. Beleived 3.5.3 fixed it but not sure.

Brian1

From the xscreensaver manual, here's how to start xscreensaver at boot instead of the kde screensaver. It worked for me:

USING KDE (K DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT)
I understand that KDE has invented their own wrapper around xscreensaver, that is inferior to xscreensaver-demo (1) in any number of ways. I've never actually seen it, but I'm told that this is the way you disable it:
1: Switch off KDE's screen saver.
Open the ``Control Center'' and select the ``Look and Feel / Screensaver'' page. Turn off the ``Enable Screensaver'' checkbox.
2: Find your Autostart directory.
Open the ``Look and Feel / Desktop / Paths'' page, and see what your ``Autostart'' directory is set to: it will probably be ~/.kde3/Autostart/ or something similar.
3: Make xscreensaver be an Autostart program.
Create a file in your autostart directory called xscreensaver.desktop that contains the following five lines:

[Desktop Entry]
Exec=xscreensaver
Name=XScreensaver
Type=Application
X-KDE-StartupNotify=false

4: Make the various "lock session" buttons call xscreensaver.
Replace the file /usr/bin/kdesktop_lock with these two lines:

#!/bin/sh
xscreensaver-command -lock
Make sure the file is executable (chmod a+x).

Now use xscreensaver normally, controlling it via the usual xscreensaver-demo (1) and xscreensaver-command (1) mechanisms.

Nice fix there pilotgi. I will make a note on that one for future refernece. After seeing the chmod commands I remember it seemed to be a permissions issues that caused the blank screen.

Brian1