Searched through the forum but seems no-one has asked this before. Why does my Debian (woody) Linux keep blanking the monitor in XFree86? The screen goes blank every 15 min. until I press something. I want to disable this!

Already did these:
setterm -blank 0
xset -dpms
xset s noblank
xset s off

It still keeps blanking. What shall I try next? Also disabled all power management from KDE. And I did all of these to both, root and the normal user.

I've also been trying to get this to stop on my red hat and also my fedora box. i't would be great to find the answer. I was actually looking for a few hours today to no avail.

>Craig

It sounds like you've already tried the things I have done on my RedHat 8.0 laptop. As root I tried:

xset -dpms
xset s off
xset s noblank

One thing you didn't mention is what 'xset q' tells you. If it says that your dpms is disabled and that the screensaver is off, then I would look at your bios settings.

I'm not sure what type of pc you are using, but on my laptops there is the ability to turn off any power management being done in the bios.

Also for others, these links have addressed this issue.
It sounds like you've already tried the things I have done on my RedHat 8.0 laptop. As root I tried:

xset -dpms
xset s off
xset s noblank

One thing you didn't mention is what 'xset q' tells you. If it says that your dpms is disabled and that the screensaver is off, then I would look at your bios settings.

I'm not sure what type of pc you are using, but on my laptops there is the ability to turn off any power management being done in the bios.

Also for others, these links have addressed this issue.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...creen+blanking
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...creen+blanking

Whoops - sorry about the accidental cut-n-paste

That's what it says... The first thing I did, was to check the BIOS for power management settings. I've turned them all off. With Windows 98, though, it did not blank the screen. So I assume this is a problem with Linux. Either X or something else is doing it.

It sounds like you are on the right track. Do you boot your linux box to runlevel 5 - to X? If so, most of them will allow you to boot with another windows manager. On my redhat box, there is a menu item on the login screen labeled "Session" which allows me to pick a different login manager.

You can continue to diagnose the problem by logging in with different window managers. The pc I have disabled screen blanking on boots into gnome with a default user. I doubt the default user has anything to do with my success.

Some of the other links I posted mention disabling screensavers in KDE. I don't use KDE much so I'm of no help if that is really where the problem is. Good luck.

I guess runlevel 5 does not mean booting into X in Debian. But anyways, I boot into runlevel 2, which is the text mode, X is not starting automatically.

I'm not running any window manager, just a single program starting with X. But I have the screen blanking problem at least with Fluxbox, IceWM and without any window manager. KDE is much too heavy for this computer, but I do have it installed and also disabled screensavers and power managements from the KDE Control Center.

I guess it's the X Server itself causing the screen blanking.

Solved!

Actually, it was more than a simple thing to do. X just simply didn't remember the screen blanking settings, after each time it had been closed.

So everytime I start X, I need to enter:

xset s off
xset s noblank

I made a script to do this after each X startup.


Now I wish I could make auto-login for a normal user with no rights... and to console, since I'm not booting into X by default.

I've got the same problem.

Can you describe the script you wrote and how you execute it each boot (with chron?) to get it to work?

I start X manually from the command line, so I just edited $HOME/.xinitrc and added a line there:
Home folder contains the launcher-script, which has:
The last line would naturally be "exec startkde", or "exec icewm-session", depending on which window manager you use.

The purpose of this computer is just display continuously some webpages. I also made it to automatically log in and start X. This I made by writing /etc/rc2.d/S99alogin-script (which contains "login -f username") and renaming S99rmnologin to S89rmnologin. $HOME/.bash_profile has the "startx"-command then.

Thanks for your reply.

I also found an alternative solution.

I add the following to /etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup_0

xset -dpms // This *should* turn off the dpms power management stuff
xset s noblank // This should turn off screen blanking
xset s off // This turns off the screen saver

I *ALSO* need to comment out the dpms statement in the monitor section of
/etc/X11/XF86Config

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Unprobed Monitor"
HorizSync 31.5 - 37.9
VertRefresh 50.0 - 70.0
# Option "dpms"
EndSection


This solved the problem for me on Redhat 9.

I noticed that your way might had been easier, after all. Thanks for pointing it out.

I've just installed Fedora 1 and have the same problem. I did all what you guys suggested but it didn't work for me. I think this is still a problem which was submitted to RedHat as a bug for a pending solution. I'm thinking about trying Mandrake 10 to see if it can be better.

Another method to disable the screensaver is to goto the menu bar / preferences / control panel / screen saver

set MODE to "Disable Screensaver".

My Panasonic monitor on IBM G30 running Linux debian 2.4.25-1-386 was blanking out after 10 minutes while KDE was idle. I edited XF86Config and removed Option "dpms" like obewan mentioned and followed the directions in the file to allow future updating. After rebooting, screen no longer blanks out. I did not run # dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 because this sent me thru a new configuration wipeing out the changes I just made.