Re: something triggering my screensaver timeout (login dialog) - sid, xfce

[Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net>]

On 1/5/14, Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sb, 04 ian 14, 13:33:05, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
>> My login dialog, after I lock my screen, gets repeatedly triggered -
>> as though some keyboard key or mouse movement occurs - even after
>> unplugging my two mice.
>>
>> I have a trackpad which is disabled in bios.
>>
>> There is a trackpoint - the only thing left.
>
> You might have noticed that Trackpoints sometimes start "drifting".
> Something like that would definitely trigger the timeout. On ThinkPads
> it helped if I "wiggled" them a bit.

This is true. The wiggle is useful for trackpoint drifting.

My trackpoint has no drift - eg. running xev by itself (brings
user-level window), keep cursor in xev window, no mouse movement
events at all (I have mouse, trackball, trackpoint, disabled trackpad)
for over a minute.

Yet I lock the screen with Ctrl-Alt-L, and inside 20seconds, the
unlock password dialog appears!

So the events as I posted earlier are the culprit I can only guess.
And they are not mouse move (Motion Notify) events as far as I can
tell. Here are some sample MotionNotify events:

MotionNotify event, serial 37, synthetic NO, window 0xae00001,
    root 0xb2, subw 0x0, time 169639919, (36,124), root:(918,632),
    state 0x10, is_hint 0, same_screen YES

MotionNotify event, serial 37, synthetic NO, window 0xae00001,
    root 0xb2, subw 0x0, time 169639927, (37,124), root:(919,632),
    state 0x10, is_hint 0, same_screen YES


OK, time for some cannons:

I wrote a brief wrapper script for xscreensaver and
xscreensaver-command, and redirected the /usr/bin/ versions to my
versions which output two lines to a log file. Heres some output:

/home/justa/bin/xscreensaver-command -version
Monday 6 January 00:11:15 EST 2014
/home/justa/bin/xscreensaver-command -version
Monday 6 January 00:11:45 EST 2014
/home/justa/bin/xscreensaver-command -version
Monday 6 January 00:12:15 EST 2014
/home/justa/bin/xscreensaver-command -version

SO! Every 30 seconds, /usr/bin/xscreensaver-command -version is being
called by SOMETHING, which is causing xscreensaver to wake up, it
seems!
from man xscreensaver-command :
       -version
               Prints the version of xscreensaver that is currently
running on the
               display: that is, the actual version number of the
running xscreensaver
               background process, rather than the version number of
xscreensaver-
               command.  (To see the version number of
xscreensaver-command itself, use
               the -help option.)

So this is contacting xscreensaver, which is getting turned into:
  xscreensaver-command -deactivate

Any ideas how I might debug this further?
Eg, is it possible to determine what's calling  xscreensaver-command ?

TIA
Zenaan