I am having issues with screensaver on Linux Mint 18 Sarah.

When I log in I am greeted with the screensaver selection dialog. The correct screensaver is selected however it never turns on.
Power management is set to turn off the screen when inactive for 10 minutes (yet i have also tried by switching that to never)
Suspend when inactive for is set to never.
Here is a screenshot of the screensaver settings

Attached Thumbnails

 

What desktop environment are you using?

I'm pretty sure that Mint 10 reached end of life quite a while ago. It's not even listed on the Mint "Old Versions" page, but intense research--er--five minutes of searching did not yield a precise date.

Sorry that was a typo. Its Linux Mint 18.
Cinnamon desktop.

I have Mint Cinnamon in a VM. I fired it up and waited. The screensaver started without issues. Note that I have done nothing to configure it in any way and it's not in System Settings-->Startup.

I'm not quite sure what to suggest here. I just did an

[CODE]ls /usr/bin/*screensaver*
]/CODE]

in the VM and it returned three different screensaver programs (gnome screensaver, xdg-screensaver, and cinnamon-screensaver. The thought I have is to kill the screensaver program you have running, start it from the command line, and look for error messages.

I don't think it will work, but it's the best I can come up with.

The only screensaver I use is xsreensaver. If a distro comes with anything else, I remove it and install xscreensaver. All the rest are pale imitations.

1 members found this post helpful.

Belikewater,

hydrurga has solved the confusing screensaver wording here at post #6:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...18-4175583681/

The bottom option Lock the computer when inactive is the amount of idle time before the screensaver activates, while Delay before locking the screen is the subsequent delay before the screen is actually locked.

my laptop puts it's own screen to sleep with inactivity. It's a simple way to extend battery life, is your scree blanking before screen saver even starts, so it's running but invisible.

...is not the same as screensaver!