[SOLVED]-MGA4 Screen will not stay on while watching videos

[jaywalker]

I thouht I knew all there was to know about this problem, as learned from earlier struggles in the Mandrake/Mandriva days, but it is back.

Either I have forgotten the incantation which goes with the wand waving or this is something new(-ish).

I could not disable the screen saver with Tools->Screensaver so I uninstalled xscreensaver. Still the screen blanks after 10 minutes viewing time.

I have searched all the likely looking tools in the Tools menu and even cast an eye over the services listed in MCC but I cannot discover the identity of the secret agent who is going behind my back and thwarting my efforts to assert control over my computer and TV screen.

So far it is a fairly conventional MGA 4 installation with the usual LXDE desktop (though unusually I have left Pulse in charge of the sound) but I have uninstalled xscreensaver and disabled the acpid service. These tweaks have not helped so I may revert them. The X driver is flgrx and the screen is connected on the HDMI interface.

Interestingly, executing

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xdg-screensaver status

returns "enabled" !!!

Anyone with inside knowledge able to help me keep my screen lit?

Richard

[benmc]

Hi

In the system settings try also power management under hardware

[jaywalker]

Thanks benmc and good afternonn.

I lost my reply in a keyboard snafu so I'll make this a bit brief I checked an MGA 4 VM I have on my local m/c for something which might match your description. I looked in MCC Hardware and System sections and in the Tools->System Tools section of the MGA menu. I also hunted in the rpmdrake System group for a Settings section. That was where I found some mention of power management tools, nowhere else, but none of them were installed with a standard LXDE installation, yet something clearly is managing the power, at least for my TV screen.

I suppose I could try some of those rpms, even if they are for Gnome or KDE or RazorQT or Mate, or anything else under the sun other than LXDE, but all I want to do is find the secret agent which is messing with my power settings and get rid of it, after hopefully repairing the damage it is doing to my system. Even if one of those tools would do the job, I wouldn't end up any wiser as to how it happens and what to do next time.

I can't help feeling this is some new "improvement" which is as well documented as these things usually are, but I have no idea where to look. Actually, I sort of have a sneaky feeling this is something to do with systemd - it usually is, when something starts to behave differently - but I don't have time to study for that PhD, I just want to watch some telly!

Time for bed now. Maybe it will come to me in a dream.....

Richard

[benmc]

Hi

the system settings are available in the KDE desktop settings.
as I dont use the other desktops it may well be one of those " improvements " that you may have to alter via a terminal.

regards

[catowner]

So you connect your computer to a TV through the HDMI connection?

It may be that its the TV management settings that is causing it to switch off/blank screen rather than LXDE on the computer. I have a modern flat screen monitor for my pc and it does the same thing even when I have disabled the screensaver. The monitor will still go in to standby mode after so many minutes of "inactivity" from the pc. I could not find a way of disabling this feature in the monitor so I increased its standby time to something like 2 hours and now I can watch a DVD through the pc without it going in to standby after 10 minutes or so.

If your TV is not getting any activity from your pc then it could be doing the same thing. Have a look in the TV manual to see if there is a way of disabling the screensaver option for your TV.

also, when watching a DVD through your pc on the TV, if you move the mouse or tap the touchpad (if you have one) does it re-awaken the TV?

edit doktor5000: removed double-post

[doktor5000]

@jaywalker: Also recently stumbled upon that.
AFAIR, it's either xscreensaver kicking in blanking the screen (cf. viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7671 ) or X DPMS settings which you can query via xset -q
I've never really found out what triggered this, as I also disable screensaver and energy saving completely.

[madeye]

I have had to add the following to the ServerLayout section of my xorg.conf to disable all this blanking.

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    Option "Standby time" "0"
    Option "Off time" "0"
    Screen "screen1"
    Option "Blank time" "0"
    Option "Suspend time" "0"


It's like the DE does not control it deep enought to handle xorg?

[doktor5000]

It's like the DE does not control it deep enought to handle xorg?

Nope - that's exactly what xset can do within the X session.

[jaywalker]

OK, from the top; it isn't a very modern TV (1280x720p) and it doesn't have a "screensaver" mode that I have ever noticed - watched many DVDs through HDMI connector and satellite via SCART So I am fairly certain it is some form of not-so-helpful eco-management on the Mageia box.,

I used the screensaver tool in Tools to disable power management before I resorted to removing xscreensaver, but neither step had the desired effect. The box is off at the moment and everyone's in bed, but I can get it turned on tomorrow evening and have a poke around, I will try the xorg configuration suggestion and then see what I can get from xset, but I may have to fix whatever went wrong with my x2go connection sometime between last Tuesday and Sunday to use xset as it is unlikely to make much sense running it on a ssh session.

Later, folks, and thanks for the suggestions.

Richard

[benmc]

Hi Richard.

Under screensaver preferences you should have 2 tabs: display modes and advanced.
Set the timer for the maximum number of minutes before the screen turns off.

regards

BenMc

[jaywalker]

OK, good news, but first a few comments about the "Screensaver" control utilit in Tools menu; it goes when xscreensaver is removed so it is not available for experimentation at the moment and it seems to be able to do something even if xscreensaver is installed but not active.

I say that because it always prompted me to activate xscreensaver each time I ran it, but on declining the offer it would still enable me to change some of the screen blanking options. It just wouldn't let me turn off screen blanking. My brother says he had to let it activate xscreensaver and then he could turn off screen blanking, but I cannot be sure that works.

What did work? Thanks again Dok for your xset sugestion. I read the man pages and got confused so I tried

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xset -q

which tod me about the various timeouts and that DPMS was active. A re-read of the man page told me that

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xset -dpms

would disable it so I tried it and the screen still went blank after 10 minutes.

Then I tried

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xset s off

and checked with

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xset -q

to see that DPMS was off and the first screen timeout which had been 600 was now 0. That did the trick.

The next minor matter was how to make the selection persist across reboots, which I didn't even begin to try to solve. It seems likely that the xorg.conf additions sugested above would achieve this for the system, but as the xset command can be run by an ordinary user I decided just to stick the required commands into a little shell script which LXDE runs from its user's autostart directory.

Job done. Thanks to all who helped.

Richard

[doktor5000]

The next minor matter was how to make the selection persist across reboots, which I didn't even begin to try to solve. It seems likely that the xorg.conf additions sugested above would achieve this for the system, but as the xset command can be run by an ordinary user I decided just to stick the required commands into a little shell script which LXDE runs from its user's autostart directory.

Cf. viewtopic.php?p=48671#p48671