Gnome Screensaver does not activate when time limit is reached

[chunchengch]

I set the screensaver to act when the computer is idle for more than 5 minutes,
however, the screensaver fails to activate when the time limit is reached.

[Andreas Moog (ampelbein)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. What screensaver have you activated? Does it work when you use the "preview" option in the preferences?

[chunchengch (chunchengch)]

1. I set the screensaver to random, I ever tried the others, nothing different.
2. It does work when using "preview" option, but one thing weird is that I have to click the arrow left first and then the arrow right to activate the preview, otherwise nothing will be displayed in the preview windows.

I just set the time limit to one minute and try it again, the problem persists.

[chunchengch (chunchengch)]

It is weird, I do not change anything at all, but the screensaver is normal now.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

normal meaning it's working now? Is this still an issue after latest updates?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

closing since that works now

[johnsdagg (johndaggett)]

screen saver in 9.04 does not work for me.
never works after coming out of suspend or hibernation.
a reboot sometimes makes it work again but not always. doesn't matter what type of screen saver i choose... if i set screen saver to activate after 5 minutes... at 5 minutes screen slowly starts to go dark as it tries to enter screen saver then screen pops back to fully awake.

i can see the screen saver preview as long as i do what this previous poster wrote:
"It does work when using "preview" option, but one thing weird is that I have to click the arrow left first and then the arrow right to activate the preview, otherwise nothing will be displayed in the preview windows."

ubuntu 9.04 is unable to enter screen saver state (except sometimes after a clean reboot with no other programs running).

[johnsdagg (johndaggett)]

update: today i brought jaunty out of suspend and low and behold screen saver is now working. apparently the problem is intermittent. i wish i could provide more/better info to debug/understand this problem.

[Robert Lange (rcl24)]

Sebastian: I know this is not the kind of bug you like, since it is difficult to describe and hard to reproduce reliably, but it is a real bug. Perhaps the wording of the title could be better, and we need more people to flesh out what is happening. As it stands now, I have absolutely no faith that gnome-screensaver will reliably lock my computer or protect my screen, so I always manually lock my workstation and always shut off my monitor when I am not at it. It's a shame I have to do this.

johnsdagg: Your description in comment #7 was what drew me to this bug report. In my case, I disable gnome-screensaver via the preferences dialog, so I can watch hulu.com uninterrupted. When I am done watching, I re-enable it via the preferences dialog. However, all that happens once the timeout hits is the screen fades as though the screensaver were activating, then it blinks back to the desktop. The screensaver will not properly activate until I right-click on the Lock Screen applet (that I added to my panel) and choose activate screensaver. (A weird thing that happens then is the screensaver activates, but once I move my mouse, it deactivates, but instantly reactivates, no matter how long I waited after it first came on. It does this exactly once per manual activation.) Once I have manually re-activated it, the screensaver seems to behave normally, until the next time I deactivate it. Also, a reboot or logout solves the problem, but that is of course not an acceptable solution.

For me, the problem is pretty repeatable: once I deactivate the screensaver through the preferences dialog, then re-activate it through the preferences dialog, I must manually use the Lock Screen button (either click to lock, or right-click and choose the "Activate screensaver" option to activate the screensaver, but not lock). It does not seem to matter whether I use the blank screensaver or any particular screensaver.

I first noticed this bug after upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04 on an x86 machine. I thought it was an upgrade-related bug, so I ignored it. Now I have just done a clean stock install of 10.04 on an amd64 machine, and I have observed the same problem.

Is there anyway to log screensaver events, such as activations and deactivations. Clearly the screensaver is activating, b/c the screen fades to black, but something is immediately signaling it to halt the screensaver instantly as it activates. I would like to find out what event is doing this, so we can fix this bug.

[Greg (cebif)]

I removed gnome-screensaver and installed xscreensaver. That does not have this bug. I still use gnome-power-manager to suspend my computer as xscreensaver only has power managment for the monitor.

[Robert Lange (rcl24)]

See Bug #241206 comments 16 and 17 for my explanation of this bug, and patches.