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Namor
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Joined: 14 Jun 2002
Posts: 43
Location: Madison, WI US

PostPosted: Thu Aug 29, 2002 3:40 pm    Post subject: Power management question Reply with quote

While setting up a Gentoo system power management seems to be enabled, and after a time the monitor screen goes blank. It appears power to the other peripherals also is cut.
I have a KVM that gets it's power from the keyboard PS/2 port and when the monitor screen goes blanks I lose all my peripherals and hence my KVM dies.
Is there any way to disable this power management?
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BonezTheGoon
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Joined: 14 Jun 2002
Posts: 1398
Location: Albuquerque, NM -- birthplace of Microsoft and Gentoo

PostPosted: Thu Aug 29, 2002 5:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Unless something has changed this does not cut power to PS/2 for keyboard or for USB (sorry I don't have a PS/2 mouse to check with) -- I know this because all the merry while I am compiling my NUMLOCK LED is lit on my keyboard and my Optical Mouse lets off a nice glow. My guess is that your KVM takes power from the VGA connection (in addition even to the others, but maybe not) and it is the fact that the display signal ceases that is causing you trouble. You might look into finding your KVM AC adapter (which I think they all come with, but I agree it is generally nicer to leave it out since it is optional -- I am writing this now through a KVM without the AC adapter) and using it just during the system build. This (of course) does not answer your question and is merely a suggested work-around.

Curiously though when you come back to the machine when it has 'blanked' your screen you are unable to wake it by pressing the 'Shift' key? This is what I do while building a Gentoo system and it works great for me, admittedly though my home Gentoo system does not use a KVM.

Unfortunately I don't know how to disable the power-saving feature, but will be glad to learn if a more experienced Gentoo-er visits this thread and enlightens us all!

Regards,
BonezTheGoon
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ichi
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 05, 2002 7:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The screen blanking is part of GDM i thought. I could totally be mistaken. That i'm not 100% sure of, however that's the first thing i'd look at. Also ensure that the APM daemon isn't running for some reason, turn of APM in the bios and in the kernel config. However honestly the Belkin KVM is approx 130$ for the USB/PS2/Sound 4 port, and 99$~ for the 4 Port PS2 Model. I picked mine up from Comp**a and it works wonders, as long as i'm not running X11. I'll figure out the fix to that soon or just use the KVM for slack->XP however different story.

My personal suggestion would be to just upgrade your KVM to one which has an AC power supply or gets the power from non-keyboard interference. I personally have tried for a long time to get the APM to stop on my *nix box. and it has failed miserably every time. the best i can do is set the screen blank time to an incredible number that i'll never hit. Other than that the rest is probably going to be in Kernel, a/o BIOS.
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Raccroc
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 08, 2002 5:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

While I'm not 100% sure with Gentoo because I haven't tried it yet (I'm new to Gentoo and *just* got a working box up), whith all other distros I've used, this will usually turn off screen blanking...

setterm -powersave off -blank 0

Now, here is the hitch: I'm not sure which script needs to have this in place in order to default it. I'll normally log in as root (su, sudo, etc...) run the command, then log out. It should hold for all users until next reboot.
(An extremely useful trick is to syslog *.* to tty9 so you can watch netfilter messages, mailer messages, etc. scroll by on systems not currently being used for console access...useless though if screen keeps blanking).


Also of note, if you are in X, you will need to open up a term session and run...

xset -s off

xset oft times needs to be run more than once and is fairly flaky (in my experience). It also requires that you have previously turned off power saving via setterm before launching X (again...this is an "as a rule" statement" and my not ever hold true on any given system).

Hope this helps...good luck.

(If anyone happens to know how/where to change the default behavior, I'd love to know. Thanks,)
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miah
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 18, 2003 6:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

As per the setterm man page:

-store (virtual consoles only)
Stores the terminal's current rendering options as the default values.

So presumably running:

Code:
setterm -powersave off -blank 0 -store


...would do the trick. Depending on your choice of window manager the settings for xscreensaver would be different.

I havn't tried it so no guarantees.
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Caoineag
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 21, 2003 3:47 am    Post subject: Re: Power management question Reply with quote

Namor wrote:
While setting up a Gentoo system power management seems to be enabled, and after a time the monitor screen goes blank. It appears power to the other peripherals also is cut.
I have a KVM that gets it's power from the keyboard PS/2 port and when the monitor screen goes blanks I lose all my peripherals and hence my KVM dies.
Is there any way to disable this power management?


Out of curiosity, do you want to keep some version of power management or not? If not, why don't you either kill Bios support for the screen blanking or, if you actually have a system up and running, kill the kernel support for power management. That is what a friend of mine had to do to mine (both steps). My particular laptop had an extremely aggressive power management that made it impossible to emerge anything while it was on. Now my computer behaves like an angel.
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pjp
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Joined: 16 Apr 2002
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PostPosted: Fri May 02, 2003 2:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Turning screen blank off.. now where was it..
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