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Re: DPMS

On Sun, 7 Jul 2019, Christopher M wrote:


In Deb 9 KDE on Deb 9 as soon as I logged in DPMS would be disabled
and my screen would not turn off.


Your question is one about power management for the display under KDE.

I have no experience with KDE, and very little understanding in
general of display managers or desktop environments. So my suggestions
are made in ignorance of whether your display manager or DE might
somehow override the effect of the changes I suggest here.


I would have to manually go into the command line and run a line ( I
forget what it was I ran) but basically it was the command to enable
DPMS which once enabled, the screen would turn on and off... But if
I was to log off or restart, DPMS would be disabled again.


The man page for xset(1) describes a couple of options for
enabling/disabling DPMS (Energy Star) features,...

 $ xset +dpms # Enable dpms
 $ xset -dpms # Disable

And it describes an option that lets you set what duration (in
seconds) of inactivity will trigger a transition to each of the three
non-"on/normal" DPMS states (namely "standby", "suspend", and "off").

To standby after 6 minutes, suspend after 1 hour, turn off after 3
hours (of inactivity):

 $ xset dpms 360 3600 10800 # until-standby, until-suspend, until-off

A value of 0 for any of these three numeric arguments disables the
corresponding state:

 $ xset dpms 3600 0 0 # Standby after 1 hr. Never suspend/off.

According to the man page, setting the triggering durations (to some
non-zero number, I guess) will implicitly enable DPMS.

The xset(1) command can set a lot of other display preferences as
well. To review all the current such settings, you can do:

 $ xset q
 [non-DPMS output snipped]
 DPMS (Energy Star):
   standby: 600  suspend: 600  off: 600
   DPMS is Enabled
   Monitor is On

I am somewhat curious what output you get for this command:

 $ zgrep DPMS ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.*.log*


I am writing to find out why this happens


I'm not sure I'm equipped to troubleshoot that question with
you. Maybe a helpful KDE genius, generous with their expertise, will
turn up if we revive the thread a little.


and how can I make DPMS enabled on start by itself or writing out a
script to automatically enable DPMS on start.


If you are able to use xset as above to make your display behave as
desired in your current session, then you could try the first three
steps below (as root), to inform future startups of the xorg server
about your DPMS preferences.

[Steps begin]

Step 1. Go to /etc/X11

 ~# cd /etc/X11
 /etc/X11#

Step 2. If there is no xorg.conf.d directory there, then create
one. Make it the current working directory:

 /etc/X11# mkdir -v xorg.conf.d
 mkdir: created directory 'xorg.conf.d'
 /etc/X11# cd xorg.conf.d
 /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d#

Important: If you already had a /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d directory before
completing step 2, then make sure not to clobber the contents of any
existing files when you do step 3; use 'ls' or something to make sure
that /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-monitor.conf does not already exist.

Step 3. In the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d directory, create a file
'10-monitor.conf' with the following contents:

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier "Monitor Insomniac"
	Option "DPMS" "true"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier "ServerLayout Sleepy0"
	Option "StandbyTime" "1"
	Option "SuspendTime" "2"
	Option "OffTime"     "3"
EndSection

Step 3, continued: In the above file, the <number> in lines of form

     Option "*Time" "<number>"

stands for *minutes*, not seconds. (This is different from the xset
commands, which are stated/expressed in terms of seconds.)

Do change the StandbyTime/SuspendTime/OffTime numbers from the values
in my example to whatever suits your needs.

Also, know that the Identifier strings are required (I'm pretty sure)
but arbitrary. I chose "Monitor Insomniac" and "ServerLayout Sleepy0",
but you could pick "Jack" and "Jill", if it suited you.

[Steps end]

The next time the xorg server starts up*, verify that it is
aware of the settings you specified in step 3 (you could use "xset q"
to check this), and then observe whether they are effective.


This problem is what is keeping me from using Debian...


Bummer.


I really like the OS.


Me too.


But this is my only hold up. This problem made me go back to Kubuntu
18.04 until I can figure out why this is happening to me, and find a
way to fix my problem.


Well, I hope this helps.


[*] But how to efficiently/politely get your display manager to
restart the xorg server? I don't know, since I have no display manager
at hand to play around with. A reboot would be more than sufficient to
ensure a restart of xorg of course, but it's overkill. In your place,
I might try the method suggested here:

  https://askubuntu.com/questions/1220/how-to-restart-x-window-server-from-command-line#answer-1222

That is, just restart the display manager:

 # systemctl restart display-manager

To be on the safe side, I would save any work first, just as if I were
doing a full reboot.

[**] I have CCed the OP since it seems possible they are not
subscribed to the list:

  [🔎] fbf5f8e026b54c77d7756685998c171e54231585.camel@cwm030.com">https://lists.debian.org/[🔎] fbf5f8e026b54c77d7756685998c171e54231585.camel@cwm030.com

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