Screen blanking much like a blank very dim screen saver

[John]

On Thu, 25 May 2017 16:49:24 +0200
René J.V. Bertin <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

It looks like kscreenlocker is the culprit. A search using part of the name plus * found bits in several places. One in ~/.config with rc on the end of it so I renamed it and that seems to have cured the problem. I found the executable in lib64. I expected it to be started via a desktop file but no signs of one.

The one man committee might like to bear in mind that something like this with no control and over ride is likely to annoy a number of people. I had disabled the screen lock and that's been fine for a couple of months and then this started happening. Being fair earlier on the same code was writing messages to disk stating if I didn't click in 10 attosecs my machine would be locked so the disable has been a cludge. Seems that went a few weeks ago and now there is another resent cludge that just blanks and dims the display with no control over the time even when the lock is disabled. I assume it will be sorted at some point.

Pity it's not launched with a desktop file though - easy to stop. :-( On the other hand it might have a different name. 

No I don't think that xset -dpms did anything at all. In fact looking at X it's hard to see how any part of it has anything to do with the monitor. the conf file has gone and been replaced with a conf.d directory but nothing in it relating to the screen that makes any sense.

My baloo start ups are back in my config now for some reason but it doesn't seem to be running - need to check through that again.

John
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