Hello everybody. I 've recently updated to slack (with KDE) 10.0 and I came across to a strange problem.
I have set from power management, the monitor to shut down after 5 min of inactivity. Very often while I am typing or moving the mouse the monitor turns off and immediatelly turns on again. I have noticed that it happens when I am typing with openoffice writer or while managing my files with krusader. It never happens when moving mouse over the desktop. Also if I pass the cursor over the taskbar every couple of minutes it never happens. I guess the problem comes from that somehow kde doesn't "feel" when I am working with theese applications (openoffice, krusader) and it takes it as if my mouse and keybord are inactive.
I would appreciate any help.

I'd suggest increasing the time to monitor shutdown.

I 've tried it. It won't help no matter if the time is set to 1 or 60 minutes. It's really strange.

I've read about this before.

I believe it has to do with Kwin, the kde window manager. It is what's reporting inactivity. For some reason, typing doesn't register as activity, but is a trigger to bring the monitor back up to life.

Also, if you keep the mouse within one window, you'll find the same behavior. Passing over the task bar or title bars or window decorations reports usage.

I'm not aware of a fix.

--Shade

I would also ask whether or not this is just the simple case of a loose power or video cable connection. It's a longshot, but if these sudden shutdowns only occur when you are typing or moving the mouse, it may be that those vibrations may jiggle the cables on the monitor ever so slightly.

Again, it's a longshot but I'd make certain that everything is seated tightly. -- J.W.

That's a good suggestion, J.W., but this is also a known problem (at least to me) on Slack 10 and its version of KDE/Kwin. I'd tend to think this is another occurance of that.

I also imagine that most of us who dive deeply into linux are pretty good problem solvers to being with, and this is one of those obvious "is it plugged in?" questions that agitates some..
But hey... We've all got a loose wire sometimes

--Shade

I have that problem, too. And I posted this problem here, maybe a month ago. The bad thing is that we didn't solve it. I'm waiting for a new KDE version, to conpile it and see if it helps.

What about disable dpms in xorg.conf ? Or at least just right click on Desktop and disable screen saver from the menu when working in openoffice, not too hard manipulation after all

True, but I think I made it pretty clear that the loose plug theory was only a remote possibility, not a probability, and sometimes the obvious things are overlooked. I'm of the view that it's always useful to do a quick once-over the basics, because there's nothing quite like spending hours and hours of frustration on a wild goose chase, only to discover (for instance) that the reason you can't get any sound is because the speaker cable is plugged into the wrong jack. Apologies if my comment irritated you; it is however something that might be worth checking. -- J.W.

Well it is possible to happen in general but in my case this definitely is not the case. Maybe I should turn to the kde forums. If anybody gets a solution please let me know, because this bug is getting really bothering...

Can you give some more input about your current configuration. Like:
1. what graphic card do you use?
2. what dirver do you use (including version if it's not generic driver)?

Cheers,

Sir Oliver

I had similar problem on my Slackware 10.0 and recently found a work-around. Maybe it's a little too late answer, but I am going to post it, just in case it may still be helpful.
I got the idea after reading http://linuxreviews.org/howtos/power/xorg_dpms/ and your posts here.

The work-around:
- modify X config file for DPMS feature: in the Monitor section add
Option "DPMS" "true"
- disable power management by KDE (using kcontrol)
- make KDE run automatically the following command at the start
xset dpms standby_time suspend_time off_time
for example, you can use the autostart feature of KDE ( .kde/share/autostart )

Basically, it is to use DPMS+xset without KDE interefence.

Cheers,
wzoz

Thanks for the answer

i want to bring up this topic again because i'm using Xfce, not kde, and i'm having the exact same problem right now.

so maybe this isn't exactly a kde specific problem.

No it's not a kde problem, but at the moment I'm not having any problems with it.
I have X.org 6.8.2 and everthing works fine for me.