[SOLVED] Why does the screen always blank?

[vc]

Maybe the monitor itself has a power saving mode?

No, it's a CRT monitor, not an LCD flatpanel... an IBM G78, to be precise.  There's no hardware 'power-saving features', in either it or the computer.

[oldschool]

vc,

Well, beats me as to what is causing your problem. The fact that this cure works flawlessly for me, combined with the lack of others reporting a similar problem, leads me to believe the problem is probably not an OS power management issue. What about your powersaving and screen blanking settings in your BIOS? Are they set to take no action in every situation? That's about the only other simple to check fix I can think of...

Anyway, I'd be interested in hearing about the solution if you find one. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.


oldschool

[vc]

What about your powersaving and screen blanking settings in your BIOS? Are they set to take no action in every situation?

There aren't any such settings in the BIOS at all, oldschool - as I said, this is an older computer.  It dates from 1999, and I think that in itself is the real problem, for it has been my experience that PCLinuxOS does not get along with 'old' computers very well at all.  That is also likely the reason that no-one else is reporting similar, as very few people now would be running such 'old' gear anyway.

Anyhow; I think I may have resolved it now.  Your mention of hardware was the key, as I recall similar issues with 'early' ACPI versions in the past.  My guess is that PowerDevil is written to use only the latest versions of ACPI, and that non-PowerDevil power management would likely fall back to using APM instead - so; by disabling everything related to PowerDevil and using _only_ the basic display power management settings, at last it finally seems to be working?  At least it hasn't blanked out on me in a while... so; I'm going to leave it going all evening, and if this Firefox instance is still there to greet me in the morning, unblanked, _then_ I may finally be able to mark this problem as [SOLVED].

[JerryP]

If anyone is interested - I started coming to my desk and finding my monitor blanked. My screen saver was off, there were no power saves turned on in my bios and after careful study I couldn't find any feature my monitor might have that blanks the screen. So I went into all the setting and turned off all power management stuff. I don't know what exactly fixed it but I have a desktop system and it seemed by default there were some laptop power save features turned on. I turned these off and blanking stopped.
Still curious when I read this thread I checked, "Configure Your Desktop > System > Power Management" and it tole me this "Power Devil Daemon" was off and that it was controlled from "Configure Your Desktop > Advanced User Settings > Service Manager".  Right at the top of the list is "PowerDevil" and it's not running (which is great) with it's description being "A Laptop Power Management Daemon".

[oldschool]

JerryP,

Good news, indeed!


oldschool

[vc]

Yes, it is... I've since confirmed that it is now functioning properly; the screen no longer blanks out on me, so now I've marked this as [SOLVED] and proceeded onwards - I'm currently attempting to resolve the taskbar panel transparency issue, over in another thread.

Thanks, everyone!