# Screen does not react when entering idle, help!



## teo (Sep 6, 2020)

Hello, 

How to recover the activity of the screen at rest? The system at the moment of entering in rest the screen remains black and it doesn't react.

I am testing real old hardware with FreeBSD 12.1 in 64 bits with Xfce.


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## ekvz (Sep 6, 2020)

Do you mean the state where the monitor gets turned off? If this is the case it might be worth to experiment with `xset -dpms` (turns off display power management) and `xset s X X` (replace X with the time in seconds after which you want the screen to go blank). It's just an idea but i think DPMS might be the culprit and disabling it would at least work around the problem while the screen blanking configured by the `xset s` command would act as a replacement (which doesn't actually save power but looks the same). If that leads to an acceptable solution those settings can also be put into your X configuration so you don't have to set them again every time you restart your system.


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## teo (Sep 6, 2020)

ekvz said:


> Do you mean the state where the monitor gets turned off? If this is the case it might be worth to experiment with `xset -dpms` (turns off display power management) and `xset s X X` (replace X with the time in seconds after which you want the screen to go blank). It's just an idea but i think DPMS might be the culprit and disabling it would at least work around the problem while the screen blanking configured by the `xset s` command would act as a replacement (which doesn't actually save power but looks the same). If that leads to an acceptable solution those settings can also be put into your X configuration so you don't have to set them again every time you restart your system.



I have already turned deactive the DPMS and it continues to generate the same problem, after some time of inactivity, the monitor is black and does not react to the display screen. And also when the system bounces it freezes on the blinking cursor on the home screen.


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## ekvz (Sep 7, 2020)

I see. I guess you could turn off blanking completely with `xset s off` and just use a screensaver but i don't think it will make a difference. To me it looks like system is going into some kind of standby mode but not coming back afterwards but i wouldn't know how to diagnose that. Maybe you could try something radical like disabling ACPI just to see if that makes a difference. https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/acpi-overview.html has a part about disabling ACPI. It also says to rather use APM for old systems. Maybe that's worth trying.


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## teo (Sep 7, 2020)

ekvz said:


> I see. I guess you could turn off blanking completely with `xset s off` and just use a screensaver but i don't think it will make a difference. To me it looks like system is going into some kind of standby mode but not coming back afterwards but i wouldn't know how to diagnose that. Maybe you could try something radical like disabling ACPI just to see if that makes a difference. https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/acpi-overview.html has a part about disabling ACPI. It also says to rather use APM for old systems. Maybe that's worth trying.



The funny thing is that it happens with the Xfce desktop environment or the system in terminal mode before entering the Xorg graphic mode, which can be? I added Mate's graphical environment and it works well.


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## ekvz (Sep 7, 2020)

teo said:


> The funny thing is that it happens with the Xfce desktop environment or the system in terminal mode before entering the Xorg graphic mode, which can be? I added Mate's graphical environment and it works well.



My only guess would be that it tries to do some kind of power saving that mate (and the terminal obviously) doesn't. I am merely guess though and if it isn't ACPI related i am pretty much out of ideas.


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## Deleted member 63539 (Sep 7, 2020)

What about disable any screensavers software, e.g: xscreensaver, xfce4-screensaver? Also have a look at XFCE's power management setting.


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## teo (Sep 12, 2020)

Deleted member 63539 said:


> What about disable any screensavers software, e.g: xscreensaver, xfce4-screensaver? Also have a look at XFCE's power management setting.


The problem happen with light desktop environment like Xfce, or on the base system terminated in terminal without entering Xorg or light desktop environment like Xfce.  With "mate" desktop environment works well, there is no such black screen blackout as happens with Xfce or base system terminated in terminal.


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