Screen goes into standby when watching movies

[joemoer]

I've disabled power management for the monitor but it still enters standby after about 20 minutes of mouse/keyboard inactivity. It means I have to jiggle my mouse around every so often when I'm watching movies. Very annoying. I would be grateful for any ideas.

[Lazydog]

Check screen saver setting for your desktop and also check if there are any setting in bios that might affect this.

[joemoer]

Thanks for your reply, Lazydog.

I have my (lovely 3d) screen saver set to come on after 40mins but I never get to see it because the monitor always goes into standby after 20 minutes of keyboard/mouse inactivity.

I checked in BIOS and also the monitor's own settings but I can't see anything in either that would hint at hardware power management for the screen. It would seem to be something Mandriva is controlling as I don't have this issue on windows (sorry for swearing) or Ubuntu.

Any other ideas/solutions gratefully received!!

Thanks

Joe

[Lazydog]

OK, sounds like you have checked most things. Q:do you have power management setup on your system? Might want to look there. If you are not having issues with other OSes then it has to be a setting on this OS.

[fingal]

You could try the xset command. Open a terminal, become root (the su command) and type: xset -q .

This will produce quite a lot of output, but you need to look at the part which says:

DPMS (Energy Star):
  Standby: 900    Suspend: 1800    Off: 2700
  DPMS is Enabled
  Monitor is On

You could try typing xset -dpms to disable the whole lot. Type man xset for a more complete explanation.

[joemoer]

Thank you both for replying. Fingal, your suggestion has solved my problem. Great stuff!! Many thanks

Joe

[fingal]

Thank you both for replying. Fingal, your suggestion has solved my problem. Great stuff!! Many thanks

Joe

Good, I'm pleased to read that! I notice that the xset manual says:

These settings will be reset to default values when you log out.

So you might need to add that command into a startup script somewhere. In any case, now you know the problem can be fixed somehow!

[Lazydog]

OK, to hard code this if you are using KDE so that you don't have to change it after reboot;

Control Center -> Peripherals -> Display

Click on Power Control

There you can setup the monitor Standby, Suspend and Power Off timers. That will set the setting to be the same when rebooting.
If you are using another desktop I'm sure there will be something similar.

That is what I was talking about when I asked Q:do you have power management setup on your system?

[joemoer]

OK, to hard code this if you are using KDE so that you don't have to change it after reboot;

Control Center -> Peripherals -> Display

Click on Power Control

There you can setup the monitor Standby, Suspend and Power Off timers. That will set the setting to be the same when rebooting.
If you are using another desktop I'm sure there will be something similar.

That is what I was talking about when I asked Q:do you have power management setup on your system?

That was what I tried at first. I've actually switched off power management in there but strangely it doesn't seem to make a difference - the screen still goes into standby after 20 minutes regardless.