[kde-linux] Why is it so difficult to disable a screensaver?

[Robin Pedersen]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 9:00 PM, Gaffer. <derrick_s at tesco.net> wrote:
> Hi Robin,
>
> On Thursday 05 February 2009 08:33, Robin Pedersen wrote:
>> > As Anne said: in addition to this software control, if you have an
>> > Energy Star motherboard, it is possible that the BIOS settings are
>> > also configured to blank the screen or to put the monitor into
>> > sleep mode.
>> >
>> > So, if you have turned off the screen saver and disabled Display
>> > Power Management and the screen still goes blank, you will need to
>> > change your BIOS settings.
>
> Unfortunately not all bios implementations are equal !  I note that you
> referred to a laptop.  Simply because laptops are power conscious
> devices there may be components in its bios that are just not made
> available to be adjusted.  APIC/ACPI along with the various buggy
> implementations of those have long caused problems of various kinds.
>
> Bearing in mind that the components of the operating system have to try
> and work with these built in power management functions its not
> surprising that its difficult to override them.
>
> It might be interesting to boot from a plain vanilla DOS floppy and note
> if the display still blanks.  I checked this out on an Esystems laptop
> this afternoon and the display goes blank after 10 minutes.  There is
> nowhere in the bios to adjust that prevents this.
>

If I boot to runlevel 3, and run `setterm -blank 0`, the screen never
blacks out. So, to repeat what I've written several times in this
thread: it's not the BIOS.

-- 
Robin Pedersen