Neither the screensaver [1] nor DPMS will start on my Ubuntu 8.04 system
using the xfce window manager. The screensaver used to kick on, but I guess
some update broke it. Checking "xset dpms force standby"... works. If I do
just that, the "key up" event wakes the monitors up immediately, but if I
precede it with "sleep 2" they stay off. DMMS worked automatically once or
twice, but hasn't recently. When I got up this morning, both (LCD) monitors
were still displaying the desktop and windows, and the X idle time (as
reported by xprintidle) was somewhere above 8 hours. "xset q" says, in
part:
Screen Saver:
prefer blanking: yes allow exposures: yes
timeout: 0 cycle: 600
...
DPMS (Energy Star):
Standby: 1200 Suspend: 2400 Off: 3600
DPMS is Enabled
Monitor is On
The default X screen saver (all black) is the worst possible in terms of
power consumption, as the backlight is still on and (AIUI) black is the
highest-energy shade to produce. Good for CRTs, bad for LCDs.
Xfce Menu -> Settings -> Settings Manager, Screensaver brings up the
relevant dialog. It's not set to "random" and the timeout's set to 1 minute
just to make it easy to test. (Obviously, it didn't work last night.)
There's a button "Power Management. An entry in there is "Put display to
sleep when inactive for", but if I change it xset's DPMS settings get
changed to all 0s, meaning "off". :-(
Anyone seen this? Have I made an obvious mistake? Do I need to create a
cron job that checks X's idle time and engages DPMS if appropriate? Seems
like X should do that for itself.
[1] Yeah, I don't know that it prolongs the life of the display and the
animations certainly take power to produce, but I like it because it's
entertaining.
-- The mnky gibbering and screeching used to keep me up at night, although in the lst week or so it's prtty mch tailed off to nthng. The smell has gttn noticbly worse in the last cple of days, too. The next time I get a barrl full of mnkys, I'm going to try taking the lid off. -groo, AFCA ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
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