screen shuts off

Mr.Bone · 04-25-2005, 07:56 PM

I have a bit of a weird problem I think. I run Ubuntu linux right now and I have a problem with my screen shutting off. When I watch movies or video clips on my computer it does not realize that I am using the computer and every minute the screen turns off which is quite an annoyance to have to move the mouse or hit a key every minute. I also have my screen saver shut off. I originally thought this might be a setting in my bios ( It is a toshiba satellite A45 by the way) but I cannot find anything in there that fixes the problem. I also have all Power Management disabled for the computer. I used to rune SuSE linux a while back and I never had this problem. I have tried asking in the ubuntu forusm but they cannot figure out what is going on so I thought I would try another linux forum. Also I was wondering if anyone out there could program for linux, would it be very hard to write a program that gives the same effect as if the mouse was always being moved or a key on the keyboard was always being pressed. Something so that nix knows that the computer is being used and the screen does not shurt off?. Thanks for any help.

Brian1 · 04-25-2005, 08:15 PM

Some thoughts.
If running acpi then turn off the daemon and see if that works. ' service acpid stop '. If that works then look into /etc/acpi and see what scripts in there say.

Also make sure xscreensaver is not running. ' ps -ax | grep xsreen '. Something may ahve started the app without you knowing.

I know you mentioned power management, I assume you mean in the bios?

If I think of more ideas I will post back. Good luck.

Brian1

mrcheeks · 04-25-2005, 08:37 PM

disable the screensaver.

Mr.Bone · 04-25-2005, 08:37 PM

Code:

steve@blackbetty:~$ service acpid stop
bash: service: command not found

So that one doesnt work

Code:

steve@blackbetty:~$ sudo ps -ax | grep xscreen
Warning: bad ps syntax, perhaps a bogus '-'? See http://procps.sf.net/faq.html
 7345 ?        S      0:01 xscreensaver -nosplash
14417 pts/0    S+     0:00 grep xscreen

I did that one and unplugged the power still shut off after about a minute.

By power management I mean I open up the xscreensaver options and there is some power management options in there. I have searched through my bios for anything about powermanagement and I cannot find anything.

Mr.Bone · 04-25-2005, 08:38 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by mrcheeks
disable the screensaver.

umm I already mentioned I tried that in the first post...

Brian1 · 04-25-2005, 08:57 PM

From your above post you show this.

Code:

steve@blackbetty:~$ sudo ps -ax | grep xscreen
Warning: bad ps syntax, perhaps a bogus '-'? See http://procps.sf.net/faq.html
 7345 ?        S      0:01 xscreensaver -nosplash
14417 pts/0    S+     0:00 grep xscreen

xscreensaver is running. Kill it by running the command ' kill 7345 '
Other ways are ' pkill xscreensaver ' if you pkill installed. Of course rerun the command above to make sure what the process id number is.

You may disabled it in the gui but it could still be looking at another config to continue running. xscreensaver is strange with the gui's

Brian1

Mr.Bone · 04-25-2005, 09:08 PM

Aweomse it looks like that worked. Now is there way to make it so it turns off when I turn it off on the gui?

Brian1 · 04-26-2005, 03:58 PM

Okay if you have the pkill command then it is easy to do. Just right a script like this called xscreensaver_off. Open your favoraite text editor and enter this.

Code:

#!/bin/bash
pkill xscreensaver

Once saved it will need to be executable. This can be done two ways. In a terminal screen issue he command ' chmod + xscreensaver_off '. Or in the gui if using kde then right click the script and check the box in permissions to make it executable.

But guessing root has control of pkill to kill xscreensaver you will either need to make pkill usable to you by changing ownership of the command pkill. Or it can be added to your sudoers file. Little harder to do that way.

Let me know how it goes.
Brian1

Mr.Bone · 04-26-2005, 11:14 PM

Well was going to watch a movie and the screen shut off again. It looks like I just didnt wait long enough last night to see if it would. I tried removing option "DPMS" in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf to make sure it wouldnt shut off. Guess it is still just blanking out.