Further Adventures in the land of Leave My Fucking Screen Alone

Right. Apparently, the problem is that all the lovely gui interfaces that come with ubuntu do not know how to talk to the xserver properly when it comes to things like bloody screen savers.

This means command line people.

If you type in:

xset q

the system should show you some settings relating to the xserver. These are the settings that should be, but actually are not, changed in the Screensaver and Power Management programs that you launch from System -> Preferences.

What you are looking for is the section:

Screen Saver:
prefer blanking:  yes    allow exposures:  yes
timeout:  0    cycle:  0

If you do not want a blanking screen they should look like the above. If they actually show "timeout: [some number of seconds probably 600]" then you will be enjoying screen blanking hell.

So, you type in:

xset s 0

to disable the screensaver timeout.

Now, you should be able to leave the machine for more than 10 minutes without frantically wiggling the mouse or hitting random keys to keep it alive. Why in the name of sanity the Preferences settings DO NOT ACTUALLY CHANGE this setting is a complete fucking mystery to me. I mean really, what is the fucking point of having a Preferences dialogue for this setting anyway? It doesn't actually change anything, other than my blood pressure. Here is a bug report on what appears to be this issue going back to 2006.

Apparently, if you want this change to be permanent you need to stick the following lines into your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Oh yes, that should be fun. Editing xorg.conf is a shortcut to corrupting your display and having to sacrifice your first born to get a graphical user interface back. Use at your discretion, and for fuck's sake keep a backup and have a LiveCD on standby.

Section “ServerFlags”
        Option "BlankTime" "0"
        Option "StandbyTime" "0"
        Option "SuspendTime" "0"
        Option "OffTime" "0"
EndSection 

Now, back to using F1 Live Timing without the screen going dark in the dying moments of Q3 a-fucking-gain.

Ubuntu Screen Saver Redux

IMPORTANT UPDATE: There is a solution here. Well, it worked for me anyway.

There is quite clearly some sort of bizarre fetishist working at Canonical. This individual gets their rocks off by entering into a cat and mouse game with Ubuntu users who do not want their fucking screens to go blank every 10 minutes.

The user starts by thinking that the screen is being turned off to save it from burning in. Realising that CRT's went out with Prince's last chance of decent royalties from "Let's party like it is 1999", the user will turn this option off. Especially if the user has a laptop which very rarely have a CRT displays - even in the second millennium.

(Although I did once encounter one. Some stupid bugger had bought a "Laptop" off some bloke down the pub for his child for Christmas. Turned up at my house at about 8pm on Christmas eve with something that looked like a double sized oscilloscope. You could only accurately describe this as a Laptop if you were a T100. He wanted some games for the vessel of his genes to play on their new computer of Christmas morning. I found some mouldy 5 1/4 inch disks (!) with some shareware on them and sent the man home, with a tear in my eye at the thought of the agonised disappointment that was going to be etched into the face of the little cherub that has been expecting a Sega Mega Drive from Santa and instead got a shitbox that could barely play monochrome pong. Oh, and I missed most of Hunt for Red October which was on TV trying to get the fucking thing to work).

So you turn off the screen saver and wait the requisite 10 minutes. Blank screen. Oh for fucks sake. You then think "A Ha!", maybe this is a POWER saving not a SCREEN saving option. After all I am running a Netbook where battery life is at a premium. The OS may be cutting the power to the screen not just saving it! So - into Power Management and select 'never' for "put display to sleep when inactive for" when running on AC power. Wait 10 minutes, blank screen. Oh for fuck's sake.

If you used previous versions of Ubuntu, then you have fought this battle before. You will recall that what you need to do, after HOURS of googling, is use your friendly neighbourhood gconf-editor to change the /apps/gnome-screensaver/idle_activation_enabled setting to false by unchecking it. So, using Karmic you uncheck this.

At this point the aforementioned fetishist giggles with glee and starts to touch themselves inappropriately.

You wait 10 minutes, and ......

Blank screen!

Fucking bastards. This worked in the previous version of Ubuntu and now you have fucked it up you bastards. Where, WHERE FOR FUCK'S SAKE, is the god damned setting which stops the fucking display going blank after 10 minutes. And why if you uncheck Activate Screensaver AND set turn off display to never does the fucking display keep going blank?

If this is not fixed in Lucid, I am going to hunt down the little pervert who is toying with me, and I am going to perform activities on them that would sicken Dr Mengele EVERY 10 MINUTES until they fix this.

Turn Off Screen Saver in Ubuntu

OK, so CRTs are, like, so 20th Century. If you left them running showing the same image for days on end, like the log on screen in a computer lab, you would eventually find that image burnt onto the screen itself. This is bad. So we invented the screensaver, a bit of software which detects when you have not typed anything or moved the mouse for a while and either blanks your screen, rifles through your pictures collection, or shows some high art animation usually involving toasters. This stops the insides of the CRT from being damaged.

However:
a) no one uses CRTs anymore
b) LCDs do not burn in
c) sometimes I want to leave the screen displaying information without the fucking screen going dark every ten minutes.

Now, I am an intelligent guy, so I go to the System -> Preferences -> Screensaver tool and uncheck the "Activate Screensaver when computer is idle" dialogue box. That should do it?

After ten minutes: blank screen. Oh for fucks sake. So I go to the Power Management options from the Screensaver tool. I tell it 'Never' to put the display to sleep.

After ten minutes: blank screen. Oh for fucks sake. I have to activate the god damned trackpad every nine minutes or so to avoid the screen blanking. Brilliant. I seriously consider trying to activate the trackpad automatically every 9 minutes.

It turns out (and by it turns out I mean after spending the better part of my life trawling through google and forum searches) that you need to change a setting in the gconf file. Whatever the gconf file is. You do this by running this command in a terminal:

gconf-editor

You then navigate through the tree structure until you get to:

/apps/gnome-screensaver/idle_activation_enabled

which you set to false by unchecking it. Hey Ubuntu developers, when someone unchecks the "Activate Screensaver when computer is idle" turn off this bloody setting.

Now, here at the end of all things, sam, I finally have an LCD which does not go dark every 10 minutes.