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[SOLVED] Screen goes black after ~20mins

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AnotherUser:
Hello,

I'm running KDE MiniMe 2012.08 on a Dell Inspiron I5R laptop. It is fully updated in Synaptic and running 3.2.18-pclos2.pae.bfs kernel. Everything works fine except for one annoying behavior. When I watch online streaming video content (presumably using flash), my screen goes blank after about 20 minutes of not touching the keyboard or mouse.

I have checked to make sure that my KDE power savings settings (Configure Your Desktop --> Hardware --> Power Management) are not turning my monitor off in both powered and battery mode. I also made sure that my KDE screensaver is turned off (Configure Your Desktop --> Hardware --> Display and Monitor --> Screen Saver). I have even make sure that my BIOS is up to date. What else can be turning off my screen?

AnotherUser:
at the risk of bumping this post, I am surprised that no one has chimed in yet. Are there really no suggestions?

Texstar:
open a konsole terminal and type xset -dpms and see if that works or not.

AnotherUser:

--- Quote from: Texstar on December 11, 2012, 05:38:12 PM ---open a konsole terminal and type xset -dpms and see if that works or not.

--- End quote ---


Wow - a word of wisdom from Texstar himself! I have to admit it, you were right on the money.

For the sake of betterment of the community, here's what this all means (based on my newly found knowledge mostly driven by http://www.shallowsky.com/linux/x-screen-blanking.html). Apparently, some power settings and screensaver settings are driven by X, rather than any application (i.e. KDE) running on top of X. To find out what those settings are currently set for, all I did was run xset -q and found that Display Power Management Signalin, better known as DPMS, was indeed enabled. Running the command xset -dpms turns off DPMS. Running xset +dpms turns it back on. And indeed, when I turn off DPMS on my system, then my screen no longer goes blank when I watch online content.

P.S. Interestingly enough, DPMS settings appear to be automatically re-enabled whenever power is applied/removed to the laptop.

Nish:
I developed the same problem after the last big KDE update.  I have a desktop and use Caffeine to stop my screensaver (which it did and was still doing) but something else is blacking out the screen when I was watching streaming content too.  My desktop is my TV, I don't have cable TV so I do a lot watching streaming content.  After checking all the power save settings I gave up and just put my mouse on the sofa cushion next to me so every any little shift of my body would move the cursor

Going to give this a try, a lot easier. ;)

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