Screen blanking much like a blank very dim screen saver

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Thursday May 25 2017 14:59:26 John wrote:

> I haven't timed how long it takes to do this but I can't see any settings anywhere to control it. I hadn't noticed  that 5 doesn't seem to include a screen saver option but it behaves much like one except the screen goes close to black. It must be scanning otherwise my monitor would go into sleep mode of it's own accord.
> 
> Anyone know of a way of preventing this. Not even sure it's down to kde. I tried xset -dpms and that has no effect.

IIRC Plasma5 never had an option NOT to run a screensaver/locker (or an option to run a screensaver but without password-locking). And if memory serves me well, the consensus (from the 1-man dev team in charge of this sort of thing) is "if you want something else, just use xscreensaver". And that means replacing the executable that does the actual locking (kscreenlocker_greet in KDE's libexec directory) with a script that calls xcreensaver. This is the screen I use for that (also on my KDE4 desktop:)

---
#!/bin/sh

for a in "$@" ;do
     case ${a} in 
          --immediateLock)
               exec xscreensaver-command -lock
               ;;
          *)
               exec xscreensaver-command -activate
               ;;
     esac
done
exec xscreensaver-command -activate
---

In your case you may want to replace the lines with -activate with a bogus command but I'm not 100% certain that will actually work.

Maybe the fact that you run `xset -dpms` explains why the screen isn't entirely blanked?

R.