"The Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

That Blankety Blanker!

From Jay Freeman on Wed, 29 Mar 2000

Hey Answerguy,

I'm working on an information kiosk system, running Redhat 6.1. This thing is touch screen driven and in it's production envirnment is not going to have a keyboard or mouse attached. It plays mpeg video files, interspersed with gif "menu" screens. For performance reasons (the machine is only a 233 MMX) I want to run this under a very bare fvwm2 (no title bars etc.) but fvwm2 seems to automatically blank the screen after about 5 minutes of no activity. This does not happen under KDE. A few facts:

1. I compiled the kernel without apm support.
2. apmd is not started in any run level I am using (4 for the actual kiosk mode, 5 for testing)
3. Power management is disabled in both the bios and the monitor.

I've been poking around in documentation all day trying to find out if there is a way to keep fvwm2 from blanking the screen, to no avail. Any hints, clues, or just plain answers will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Jay

I don't think fvwm2 is actually the problem here. Try adding the following to your .Xclients or .Xsession script:

xset s off

... The xset command can control various settings in your X server. In this case I'm just disabling the X "screen blanking" feature. Read the 'xset' man page for details.

To prevent text console blanking you can use the 'setterm' command like so:

setterm -blank 0

... note: the Linux text console blanking feature is normally NOT active when X is active. So you shouldn't HAVE to take both these steps in your case. However, it won't hurt. Meanwhile I mention the setterm command for the benefit of my other readers.

Copyright © 2000, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 52 April 2000

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