FC15 Gnome 3 How to stop screen from blanking?

[Doug Hutcheson]

How do I stop the display from turning off? In 'System Settings/Screen', I can only choose from a preset range of minutes - there is no option to disable it. Very annoying when watching a 90 minute movie, for instance. At least under FC14 I had the disable option.

I tried unchecking Power Manager in gnome-session-properties, but that disabled the system from suspending when the laptop lid is closed and might have other ramifications as well.

I tried disabling Screensaver in gnome-session-properties, but 'System Settings/Screen' still showed up with the same options, so it appears to be unrelated. Anyway, I suspect this is a power management issue, not a screensaver issue.

[rant]So far, moving to FC15 has been nothing but irritating, due to some arbitrary and outrageous decisions by the Gnome 3 developers. If I had wanted a system with important decisions taken out of my hands, or hidden behind arcane command lines, I would have installed Windoze! Not Happy![/rant]

As always, any help would be appreciated.

---------- Post added at 04:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:18 PM ----------

Gnashing of teeth!

I found 'yum install gnome-shell-extension-presentation-mode', which gives a "Presentation Mode" switch on the battery icon. Once activated, it turns off the blanking, and screen lock functions. I presume this is to allow a user to run an extended presentation session - very embarrassing id the screen keeps going black during a presentation!

Why could this not be more simply solved by a toggle in 'System Settings/Screen'? Why make a simple thing hard?

Sigh! Looking forward to Gnome 3.x with a number of fixes for the poor decisions in 3.0!

---------- Post added at 05:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:38 PM ----------

The Presentation Mode fix is only temporary: it needs to be re-established after Suspend and each time I log in. Still not as good as the solution under FC14 where I could just disable it permanently, but at least I have some control.

Still Not Happy.

[Doug Hutcheson]

Correction: I have established that the setting remains established after Suspend.

Slightly happier now.

[Doug Hutcheson]

Correction #2: Even with Presentation Mode set and gnome-screensaver uninstalled, the screen still goes blank after a period of keyboard inactivity in normal use. I have not tested this while watching a video since making these changes, so do not know if the video drivers have some magic way of defeating the blank screen problem.

[Doug Hutcheson]

Correction #3: With Presentation Mode set and gnome-screensaver uninstalled, and testing after a reboot to ensure I had a clean session, the screen blanks during a video. It appears to shut down about every 10 or 15 minutes, if there is no keyboard or mouse activity. No closer to a solution yet.

[triviuss]

Well, since I'm not an experienced user I couldn't recommend you anything better than this: open Terminal and type this:

[user@user ~]$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.screensaver idle-activation-enabled false

Don't run it as root!
It's not perfect solution as you have to type this every time you log in. Try to search the forum for something else. Or give a try to something called xscreensaver - but I'm not really sure what's that, just read about

[Doug Hutcheson]

[user@user ~]$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.screensaver idle-activation-enabled false

Thanks anyway, triviuss, but it did not work for me. Left the system unattended for a while after doing this and the screen blanked anyway.

Still looking for a solution ...

[triviuss]

OK. I installed the xscreensaver to have some overview on it. It has a nice option "Disable screensaver". I think it should work.

Terminal way to install:

[user@user ~]$ su
[root@user user]# yum install xscreensaver

Then launch the app and set screensaver to be disabled.
Hope it will help

Edit:
I forced myself to leave laptop for about 40 minutes and the screen didn't become blank. So I think xscreensaver does its job well.

[Doug Hutcheson]

[root@user user]# yum install xscreensaver

Then launch the app and set screensaver to be disabled.

That worked!. I left the system inactive for over an hour and the screen did not blank.

What an obtuse way to overcome the unprintable expletive decision by Gnome 3 developers to force users to have screen blanking. It would be so much easier to have the 'Never' option set as the default and have users make a conscious decision to turn it on if they want it.

Thank you, triviuss, for your help.

[triviuss]

I'm glad to hear that it helped. And also can't figure out why "Never" isn't an option as default...
One final word: I think that you should manually start xscreen* daemon, when you log in. The GNOME one is overriding our X

[Doug Hutcheson]

you should manually start xscreen* daemon

Oh, for crying out loud! Gnome 3 strikes again!

Where in Gnome 3 do I go to control services? Under FC14/Gnome 2, there was a system menu for controlling services, but I can't find it in the new system.

Is it as simple as opening a terminal as root and executing "service start xscreen*", or is there some more obscure action to perform? From what you said, I gather there is no easy way to set this as the default setting, to remain in place after reboot. Sigh.

[rant]Gnome 3 developers, listen up: IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT! Changing the way things work just to look clever is highly counter-productive. I could not recommend any Windoze users switching to the current Fedora Linux/Gnome 3 platform, because of all the irritations you have built into the environment. Give me back my task bar. Give me back my menus accessible from an always-visible system bar. Give me back my easily-accessible services control applet. Don't make decisions for me, like forcing me to have a screensaver. Give me back my power button and don't assume I want to 'suspend', when I really want to shut down.[/rant]

[jpollard]

Have you tried "xset -dpms"?

This could just be the default dpms setting of the X server, and having nothing to do with the screensaver.

[Doug Hutcheson]

Have you tried "xset -dpms"?

Thanks for the suggestion, jpollard. I did not know about xset, so had a look at the man page. 'xset -dpms' is supposed to disable the power management settings and when I look at the result using 'xset q', the output includes:

...
Screen Saver:
  prefer blanking:  yes    allow exposures:  yes
  timeout:  0    cycle:  0
...
DPMS (Energy Star):
  Standby: 0    Suspend: 0    Off: 0
  DPMS is Disabled

Thus DPMS is off and Screen Saver is on a 0 timeout, so I assume it is also disabled.

Is there any way of making -dpms 'sticky', so I don't have to set it each time I reboot (or log out/in, I guess)?

Edit: I rebooted after a software upgrade and xset q reported dpms is still disabled, so it seems to be sticky. It will be interesting to see if my screen goes blank in the next hour ...

[jpollard]

It can be set permanently by puting a section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d to disable it. Something like:

Section "ServerFlags"
    Option "BlankTime" "0"
    Option "StandbyTime" "0"
    Option "SuspendTime" "0"
EndSection

This should effectively disable the DPMS operation. It is possible to disable the module, but that is in a different (and longer) section. I don't know if the current Xorg server allows sections to be incomplete.

One other warning - I don't use Fedora 15 (just TOO many bugs and things that don't work). I do have it in a VM, but it is broken again, and can't update itself (again), I'll have to reinstall with a more current kit before I do more tests.

Forgot about the file naming: call name the file something like /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/02-server-options.conf - this will have it loaded when the X server is read.

[Doug Hutcheson]

Thanks jpollard, I'll attend to that.

Puzzled as to how -dpms was remembered after a reboot, when nothing in the /etc/X11 tree makes reference to DPMS or BlankTime (using grep -i): the setting must be recorded elsewhere when 'xset -dpms' is executed.

I am unhappy with Fedora 15, but have the time and inclination to work through the problems, in hope that I can help others who follow on the voyage. I remember one of the first problems was that the GUI software updater crashed, but 'yum update' worked fine. I expect you have already tried that on your VM copy that won't update?

[jpollard]

The DPMS option is a compile time default for the Xorg server, so it is turned on anyway. There is also the possibility that it determines this from the EDID string from the monitor (not sure if it is included, but it could be some of the energy star stuff).

Yum is the one crashing. This is a workaround (download the update manually and install it) but reinstallation is about as fast.