built-in X.Org screensaver always activates in Xubuntu after 10 minutes

[Ryan Armstrong]

With Karmic no longer having an Xorg.conf, the default screen saver capabilities (blanking the screen after 10 minutes) of X.org are enabled.

This can be seen by running "xset q". Under "Screen Saver" a fresh install of Xubuntu Karmic will show a timeout of 600 seconds (10 minutes) for the built-in XOrg blanking screen saver. If I look at a reasonably-standard Jaunty install, the timeout is already set to 0 (as it should be).

Regardless of how you change the screensaver settings in gnome-screensaver or the power settings in xfce-power-manager, this Screen Saver is not disabled and will blank the screen after 10 minutes. The only way to currently disable the screensaver in Xubuntu is to create an xorg.conf and add:

Section "ServerFlags"
 Option "BlankTime" "0"
EndSection

Note that when I was trying a fresh install in VirtualBox, the actual screensaver wasn't coming on, even though the timeout values is clearly visible. I suspect the guest additions were interfering in some manner (the screen saver certainly activates on my Eee PC).

[Spencer Gibb (spencer-gibb)]

This also happens to me in Ubuntu proper on a Dell Latitude 6500 with nvidia graphics card

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Thanks for reporting this bug and any supporting documentation. Since this bug has enough information provided for a developer to begin work, I'm going to mark it as confirmed and let them handle it from here. Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Not confirming the issue here. gnome-screensaver disables the built-in Xorg screensaver, and that works perfectly ok here. The most likely cause for it to now work is that gnome-screensaver isn't running. What is the output of "ps aux | grep gnome-screensaver"?

[Ryan Armstrong (software+ubuntu)]

In reply to Chris's request, here is the process listing for gnome-screensaver (excluding grep locating the process command itself).

ryan 1299 0.0 0.7 17504 4080 ? Ss 18:50 0:00 gnome-screensaver

I ran this in my VM as had already done some pruning of my Eee PC's install when I was first examining the issue.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

gnome-screensaver is known to not work on Xubuntu, because it needs gnome-session. gnome-screensaver has been replaced in favour of xscreensaver on Xubuntu in Lucid for this reason. Anyhow, please kill the existing gnome-screensaver process and then run "gnome-screensaver --debug --no-daemon 2>&1 | tee gnome-screensaver.log", recreate the issue and then attach the resulting file to this bug report

[Ryan Armstrong (software+ubuntu)]

Odd. It seems to work now on my VM. I've attached the log, but it does clearly indicate that it disables the built-in screen-saver after about 10 minutes. "xset q" confirms that the timeout on the X-Org screen-saver was set to zero. I've restarted the machine with Gnome-screensaver running in Daemon mode and waited > 10 minutes afterwards and it worked then too.

Unfortunately I'm unable to re-produce the issue on my laptop due to existing workarounds that I don't particularly want to undo. So I guess it's okay right now? Or maybe it was an issue at the time but a subsequent update corrected it?

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

This bug report is being closed due to your last comment regarding this being fixed with an update. For future reference you can manage the status of your own bugs by clicking on the current status in the yellow line and then choosing a new status in the revealed drop down box. You can learn more about bug statuses at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Status. Thank you again for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please submit any future bugs you may find.