[H-GEN] laptop screen blanking in linux

[Tony Nugent]

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On Thu Apr 17 2003 at 16:02, Trent WADDINGTON wrote:

> I have a laptop that blanks my screen every 5 or 10 minutes of no keyboard
> or mouse activity.  That's ok, I guess, but it ignores the movements of my
> *external* mouse and therefore I get unwanted blanking quite often.
> 
> Anyone know how to turn off the screen blanking altogether, or get it to
> recognise my external mouse as "activity"?

I'm not sure about the mouse not being seen as activity on the
terminal, but the screen blanking is a function of the kernel's
terminal console driver.  It is possible to set the inactivity
timeout with console escape sequences[1], but the easiest way to
disable it is to use the setterm utility[2].

  [1] according to console_codes(4)
         ESC [ 9 ; n ]       Set screen blank timeout to n minutes.
  [2] according to setterm(1)
         -blank [0-60] (virtual consoles only)
              Sets the interval of inactivity, in minutes, after  which  the  screen
              will  be  automatically  blanked (using APM if available).  Without an
              argument, defaults to 0 (disable console blanking).

Of course in X, you just disable the screen saver :)

> Thanks,

Perhaps the problem with the mouse can be tweaked with different
parameters to the gpm daemon?  I have found that using external ps/2
mice on some (mostly older) laptops with linux can sometimes be
quirky like this, often not working at all, or one or the other not
working, etc.  And sometimes ps/2 mouse/kbd splitters can either not
work at all or paradoxically improve the situation.  Try using
another brand of mouse.

These quirks can be often be solved by using a usb mouse (does your
laptop have a usb slot?)  BTW, you don't have to loose the built-in
ps/2 mouse... it is possible to get gpm to use two mice in different
devices (/dev/psaux and /dev/input/mice) with the -M parameter, and
you can also get this to work with X via /dev/gpmdata - see gpm(8).

> Trent

Good luck.

Cheers
Tony

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