This has been happening for a few weeks now and I have ignored it, but it's starting to drive me nuts. about 75% of the time when xscreensaver starts it just powers off my monitor instead of launching screensavers. I am trying to figure out what the culpit could be, X, my monitor, xscreensaver, etc. If anyone has any ideas please let me know.

Thanks.

Well for whatever reason disabling "fade to black when blanking" has so far made xscreensaver start successfully 15 times in a row. I am not going to mark this as solved yet, but so far that is working. I'll keep an eye on it to see if it starts happening again.

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What desktop are you using?

Mate, I have disabled mate-screensaver. But so far that simple fix above is working. IDK why or how that would do anything, but so far so good.

Power management causes screen goes black even if there is working scrensaver.

Yeah I have everything set to never, never sleep, never suspend, and never turn off display. It happened again today, I just removed the mate-screensaver package. If that doesn't do it then I will just give up and stop using XscreenSaver. I don't even need a screensaver anyway, I'm just old school that way.

I think power-off screen is not only desktop feature. I suspect acpi management - something below desktop. Switch to runlevel 3 - no desktop - and notice does your screen blanks off.

No go, I boot to runlevel 3, always have. The monitor never shuts off in runlevel 3. At least I can't remember a time when it did. I logout of X and leave my home computer in runlevel 3 during the day so I can SSH into from my laptop if I need to. However I usually turn my monitor off. Tonight I will drop it down to runlevel 3 when I go to bed and see if powers off and report back. But like I said this is not that huge of a deal, it could be something simple I am over looking. I am not deep diving into this.

It's also worth mentioning that this is a brand new monitor that is only 3 weeks old. I can't remember if my old monitor did this. I can't rule out that my monitor is causing this, but I don't see any power related settings in the OSD menu.

However the reason I removed mate-screensaver is because it was clobbering xscreensaver and keeping it from starting if mate-screensaver was running. I set a startup command to kill mate-screensaver on X launch but mate-screensaver would eventually relaunch over time. I was going to setup a cron job to periodically kill it, but for not I am just removing it to see if that makes any difference.

Have you looked at /etc/rc.d/rc.setterm or /etc/rc.d/rc.M

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No I haven't. but that is a good place to look.

Thanks

Probably Xorg, see also this thread where dpms and X shutdown timer was discussed.

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Could this be due to XScreenSaver itself?

I run Xfce with Xfce own screensaver blacklisted, and XScreenSaver loaded in the autostart list.

IIRC I noticed the same issue OP reported after the last XScreenSaver update.

The bigger login text is nice (hour and date could be bigger)
but I think XScreenSaver is blanking the screen whatever configuration is set.


Workaround was disabling XScreenSaver from autostart,
now if I want lock the screen I have to start the deamon (XScreenSaver asks for it).

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There should xlock or something - I mean X native solution to lock X session.

Thanks everyone, it was a lower level power saving issue. Elcores thread link lead me to the fix. Adding these to autostart fixed it

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