Screen goes blank after 15 minutes.

pr0vidence · n00b Joined: 12 Apr 2002 Posts: 47 Location: Connecticut

Hello all.

Just wanna say I think Gentoo is a fantastic distro. Keep up the good work.

Enough of that

When using my Gentoo box (or any other Linux distro for that matter), or, perhaps I should say, when NOT using my box (or maybe waiting many, many hours for something to compile), the screen will blank itself out after ~15 minutes. I would like to shut this feature off, does anyone know how? I have tried killing apmd, even shutting off power management at CMOS level. I don't know what's next.

Thanks all for the help.

DaemonCat · Guest

It's a "term thing"! the variable is "blank". I'm using "BSD style init", (Slackware) so the setting is in /etc/rc.d/rc.M , which is the initialization script for the "multi user" modes. I assume that the Sys-V style has a similar script somewhare. The line to look for is:
/bin/setterm -blank 15
Simply comment it out by inserting a "#" at the beginning of the line, OR change the "15" to "0" and it's gone for everybody.
If you just want to disable it on a "per user" basis,
/bin/setterm -blank 0
at the command prompt after you log in should do it.
Check the manpage for "setterm" for all kinds of goodies!
man setterm
at the command prompt.

snowmoon · n00b Joined: 05 Jun 2002 Posts: 64 Location: Albany,NY USA

xset -dpms

might also work.

pjp · Posted: Fri May 02, 2003 2:34 pm Post subject:

Other possibilities:

xset -s off

Power management question

screen goes blank

There might be a problem with this during installation as noted in Setterm Set During install to stop screen blanks?.
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msalerno · Posted: Fri Nov 19, 2004 10:06 pm Post subject:

This should do the trick:

kimchi_sg · Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2005 6:30 pm Post subject:

setterm -blank -powersave off -powerdown
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david9999 · n00b Joined: 13 Sep 2010 Posts: 1

For some reason my screen goes blank when I have no activity. I have screen saver set to two hours and "active screen saver when idle" unchecked. I also have power-management disabled.

I've noticed this behavior when using totem but not sure if it's just with this program or not. It goes out during a movie and I have to touch the mouse to bring the picture back. Any ideas?