Screensaver starts up regardless of settings... Why?!

ernie · 07-10-2007, 06:36 PM

Yes, it is a hack, but that is as good as it's gonna get until the Xorg developers add proper control functionality. I have not had time to go look on their site to see if there is a proper fix, but I will try. If I find anything I will post back here with what I find. This has not been a high priority for me since I use a screen saver to lock my desktop if I go away and forget to lock it myself, but I do not see any reason for Xorg to have a screen saver hard coded in either (assuming this is the case).

hbush · 07-11-2007, 01:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ernie

Yes, it is a hack, but that is as good as it's gonna get until the Xorg developers add proper control functionality.

Right, and thanks for your help and explanations. Hardest thing for me was to start consider that there really might be a problem in X.Org itself, not only with my limited knowledge of Linux

Quote:

Originally Posted by ernie

If I find anything I will post back here with what I find.

OK. Maybe this thing will go away with next release of X.Org.

rm_-rf_windows · 07-11-2007, 02:13 AM

I think I've an additional clue:

When I run the two commands in the terminal, the screensaver never comes back on (xset -dpms and xset s off). It takes effect immediately, all the time, even several hours later. The command works, that's for sure. When I put the commands in /etc/rc.d/rc.local it doesn't work at all, i.e., the screensaver comes on some 15 minutes after if the computer hasn't been touched in the middle of a video, radio broadcast, etc. ...even immediately after booting.

I had a mount problem on another distro (Fedora), which I tried to resolve in a similar way. I could mount my Windows partition by running a command, but not by modifying the fstab file. So I thought I'd include the mount command in rc.local. Same thing, the mount didn't work! So there must be something about the rc.local file that I'm missing.

Yeah, I like Mandriva and its default features, but that screensaver is a nuisance. Somebody out there must know how to stop it.

Will we ever find a solution?

theYinYeti · 07-11-2007, 03:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rm_-rf_windows

I tried this, it should have worked, but it doesn't!

Does anybody know why?

It has no chance of working. The commands you use are written to "speak" to a given X display, the reference of which is found in the DISPLAY environment variable.

This variable is inexistant when the system starts. The solution depends on the X server you use (Xorg/XFree86/...), and the distribution you use, and... many things. The simplest way to address this issue, assuming bash is your login shell (it should be), is to append this to the .bash_profile in your home directory:

Code:

if [ -n "$DISPLAY" ]; then
    xset -dpms
    xset s off
fi

I did not test this, but once I wished I had known this solution; I'll try and see if the above helps.
In case DPMS becomes active by itself after some time, as someone said, it may help to replace the above code with:

Code:

if [ -n "$DISPLAY" ]; then
    while true; do xset -dpms && xset s off || break; done &
fi

However, I suspect that the real answer to the issue lies somewhere in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file...

Yves.