[mythtv-users] myth & screen saver/screen power management

[Josh White]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 12:52 AM, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com>wrote:

> On 02/03/2010 10:16 PM, Josh White wrote:
> > I have a question that will require a little back story to properly
> > frame...here goes:
> >
> > A while back, I had a frontend running on a G4 eMac running Debian
> > etch.  It worked great, but when I updated to .22, it was simply too
> > slow, and I had trouble making the eMac work with the updated version
> > of Debian.  What I've come to think of as one of the best features of
> > the way this setup worked was how the screen was handled.  I had this
> > frontend in my bedroom, and would often fall asleep with a movie or
> > recorded TV playing.  What would happen in this case was whatever I
> > was playing would finish, and mythfrontend would fall back to whatever
> > screen I played the file from.  Then 5 or 10 minutes later, the
> > computer would shut off the screen.  When I upgraded to myth .22, I
> > replaced this machine with a zotac ion machine running Ubuntu 9.10
> > (which is wonderful) except, I cannot seem to reproduce the screen
> > saver/screen power off functionality that I liked in my former setup.
>
> If you run xscreensaver or GNOME screensaver, Myth will poke the
> screensaver during playback to prevent it from activating.  You'll
> likely need to set the screensaver timeout to 2 minutes or higher to
> make it work (but the system would be nearly unusable with it set to 1
> minute, anyway).
>
> If you're running KDE's screensaver, it can be made to work properly
> with a wrapper script.
>
> Mike
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I'm running Ubuntu 9.10 AMD64/Gnome, and I'm using the defalut screensaver
(I'm not sure which one it actually is). I tried setting the screensaver to
2 minutes, and unfortunately, the screensaver starts about 2 minutes
into playback (as if nothing told it not to).  I would guess that this
"poke" that myth directs at the screensaver is where things fail (just how
does this "poke" occur?  What does "poke" mean in this context? I'm not
trying to be sarcastic, if this is a common term that I am unaware of,
please educate me;) ).  Did Ubuntu change the default screensaver with 9.10
along with everything else?

Last night I tried setting the screensaver/power management delay to 1
hour to see what happened (it's set to start the screen saver after 59 idle
minutes, and then power off the screen after 1 hour, which was the max idle
time setting).  The screensaver is set to blank the screen, and that seemed
to work, but it did not power-off, so my display was on all night showing a
very bright black screen.  Could this be a symptom of a misconfigured ACPI
setup in BIOS?  Do any of the many Zotac Ion guys out there have ACPI
settings recommendations?
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