Having a problem with screen blanking in Fluxbuntu.

March 4, 2008 3:33 PM

Having a problem with screen blanking in Fluxbuntu.

I recently started using Fluxbuntu on my old laptop, and it works great except for one issue. The system seems to save power by blanking the screen after 5 minutes or so. If I pause a video and leave it unattended, however, the screen won't come back up. I end up having to manually shut the system down.

Does anybody know how I can fix this? I've searched the Fluxbuntu forums and I can only find one post that relates to the subject. I can't find any screensaver or power management utilities - do I have to manually edit configuration files to solve this?

Thanks in advance for your help.

posted by concrete to computers & internet (6 comments total)

My laptop does something similar in Debian. I don't have a solution for you, but on mine, I can get the screen to come back on by switching to a virtual terminal and back (ctrl-alt-f1 and then ctrl-alt-f7)
posted by nzero at 4:20 PM on March 4, 2008

I'm not that familiar with this particular flavour, but you could try disabling APM as per these instructions
posted by ReiToei at 4:29 PM on March 4, 2008

Not sure if it's the best solution for you, but you can affect the monitor power management using the 'dpms' option to the xset command. For example,

xset -display :0 dpms force on

would force the monitor to stay on (use 'off' to turn it off). To set it to blank after 5 minutes, it would be:

xset -display :0 dpms 0 0 300

See man xset for more information on the options.
posted by dixie flatline at 5:24 PM on March 4, 2008

dixie flatline's answer is the best one
posted by blasdelf at 11:33 AM on March 5, 2008

That looks like it'll work. Would it be possible for me to write a script that would execute the "force on" command, start Totem, and execute the "300" command when I exit?
posted by concrete at 6:55 PM on March 5, 2008

Yes, you should be able to do that. For example, something like this in your .bashrc should work:


function totem
{
xset -display :0 dpms force on
/usr/bin/totem $*
xset -display :0 dpms 0 0 300
}


I have a similar problem with vlc--it disables the power saving when it starts, but doesn't turn it back on when it exits. I have something almost identical in my .bashrc, except with only the last xset and not the first, and it works fine so far.
posted by dixie flatline at 7:08 PM on March 5, 2008