Bug 462854

*** Bug 463134 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Yes, This totally is a waste of the backlight on my monitor. This really needs to be fixed.

*** Bug 434603 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Also applies to 32 bit systems. Despite options "DPMS" is set in my xorg.conf, no DPMS is being used.

Could you verify that DPMs is enabled with

  xset q | grep -A1 DPMS

Certainly, I've checked that before:

hss@athlon:~> xset q | grep -A1 DPMS
DPMS (Energy Star):
  Standby: 300    Suspend: 600    Off: 900
  DPMS is Enabled
  Monitor is On

same here:

DPMS (Energy Star):
  Standby: 1200    Suspend: 1500    Off: 1800
  DPMS is Enabled
  Monitor is On

My monitor is connected via DVI

xset output looks fine. Maybe broken monitor? Two things to try:

1. Does it work when booting into runlevel 3 (no X started at all) ?

2. Or when starting X manually by running
     export DISPLAY=:0; Xorg & sleep 3; xterm

Monitor is doing fine. 
Both mine and my wife's computer don't use DPMS despite I told them so. 
With SuSE 10.2 and 10.3, Power Saving works on both computers. Just 11.1 doesn't want to act as supposed. 

Sorry, cant't test runlevel 3 for the moment, as my computers are at home and I'm not...

ah hah! New discovery! The screensaver appears to interfere with DPMS settings.

My screensaver was originally set to come on before "Standby" in the power settings. Once the screensaver comes on, the screen stays on forever. I originally had the "blank screen" screensaver selected, so it looked like the screen was blank with the backlight still on, which is exactly what "blank screen" is. I think "blank screen" is the default screensaver in 11.1/KDE4, which is why a lot of people would see the same thing.

I tried disabling the screensaver, and DPMS worked as intended. But with no screensaver, it doesn't ask me for my password when I return to the computer (this is a security feature I like).

So I tried setting the screensaver to come on AFTER the DPMS settings. Now all DPMS settings work as intended, and it asks me for a password when I return to my desk.

Somehow, the screensaver is interfering with DPMS, and the default openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1 settings are creating the circumstances under which this defect is occurring.

Again, this only occurs in KDE4, not KDE3. I'm not aware about Gnome.

Frank,
Can you please post steps for a workaround?

How do you tell screensave to come on AFTER the DPMS settings?

Thanks

I set the DPMS settings in:

Configure Desktop (Personal Settings) -> General tab -> Display (under Computer Administration heading) -> Power Control

There I set everything (Standby after:, Suspend after:, Power off after:) to 15 mins. The only real important one is Standby. They could all be set to different times, but Standby is the one that matters.

Then, back to Configure Desktop (Personal Settings) -> General tab -> Desktop (under Looks & Feel heading) -> Screen Saver

I put a check mark in "Start automatically" and set it to one minute more than my Standby setting from above. So in this case, it's set to 16 minutes.

This means the screensaver never comes on, but I can still use the "Require password to stop" feature, which is found on the same screen. I set that to 1 second.

So now my screen turns off completely (even the backlight).

I also tested a couple other things. Manually turning on the screensaver by clicking on the padlock icon on the right of my taskbar also prevents DPMS from working.

For some reason, once my monitor turns off via DPMS (after 15 minutes), when I press a key on my keyboard to awaken it, the screensaver is already running and it asks me for my password, even if it hasn't been 16 minutes yet. It seems like the DPMS "Standby" setting also locks the screen at the same time. I would consider this "expected behaviour", but I wonder if it's part of the reason why DPMS is being defeated by an already-running screensaver? Maybe the call to lock the screen by DPMS is failing because the screen is already locked, and so PowerDevil (the KDE Power Management app) doesn't proceed beyond this point? I'm only guessing here, I'm no programmer.

Ok. So it's just a configuration issue of DPMS/screensaver timings.

perhaps, but it's still a bug. The screensaver should not pre-empt DPMS settings.

Well I tested these settings out. which is similar to what is in Comment#13 but lower times. My Power Control > Standby After = 4 min , Suspend After = 13 min, Power off after = 15 min. My Screen Saver Settings i have set to Start Automatically After 5 Minutes and Require a password to stop after 30 Sec. These settings did not work at all. I will try some other scenario's

*** Bug 450254 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This is a bug that's encountered by many people.  Bug 450254 that has been marked as duplicate of this has also a lot of duplicates.

So, this should be proof that it's not a particular situation, broken monitor, broken DPMS, whatever.  It's a real bug.

Disabling screen saver worked for me.  Now the monitor is turned off automatically.  KDE4, 11.1 with all updates.

Some annoying things do remain, however, despite the workaround. If we disable the screensaver, as another poster noted, the screen is not 'locked' after a certain length of time. Note too, that this bug occurs when the system is plugged in via ac adapter. On my notebook, I have this problem when ac power is plugged in, but not when running on battery.

Same behavior in openSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.2.00.

in reply to #20

if you want your screen locked upon resume do not disable the screensaver but set its timeout > power timeout and set Require password to stop.

other thing to remark is that in this scenario if monitor is powered off and resumed screensaver is on BUT monitor GOES standby when power timeout is reached nevetheless screensaver is running.

openSUSE 11.1 x86-64, KDE 4.1 (Stable repos)

Fixed, submitted.
Note that the 4.2.0 packages don't include the fix.

Will there be an online update for 11.1/11.0 for this soon, or is it necessary to install the KDE4 packages from KDE4:/Stable repo to have this problem fixed?

...And when will it be incorporated into the 4.2 build?

Yes, there will be an update (but you can switch to KDE4:STABLE too, as that's where the updates come from anyway).

4.2.1 .

I have to apologize for not mentioning that I'd noticed the problem had been fixed in 4.2.0 a week or two back. One feeble excuse is that I kept seeing a warning message that my screen-saver had not been configured and assumed there was still a problem - albeit a different one - but realized today that it was due to my random setting picking up an unconfigured saver. Silly Billy!

Update released for: kde4-kdm, kde4-kdm-branding-upstream, kde4-kgreeter-plugins, kde4-kwin, kdebase4-workspace, kdebase4-workspace-branding-upstream, kdebase4-workspace-devel, kdebase4-workspace-ksysguardd, kdebluetooth4
Products:
openSUSE 11.1 (debug, i586, ppc, x86_64)