Home / ubuntu / Questions / 1015701
In Process
jarno
Asked: 2018-03-18 01:16:11 +0800 CST

Display turns off too soon

  • 772

In Xfce power manager settings I have set 6 minutes timeout for turning display off (and never for sleep). However, display turns off sooner and xset q displays (among other things):

DPMS (Energy Star): Standby: 120 Suspend: 0 Off: 0 DPMS is Enabled

If I change the setting to say 7 minutes in Xfce power manager, the output is

DPMS (Energy Star): Standby: 0 Suspend: 0 Off: 420 DPMS is Enabled

But I want the Xfce setting to be effective from start. What sets the DPMS timeout value to different from Xfce setting? Xcreensaver is not installed.

OS: Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS with Xfce desktop

Workaround:

Add the following command in Application Autostart tab of Session and Startup dialog:

/bin/sh -c 'sleep 5 && xset dpms 0 $((60*$(xfconf-query -c xfce4-power-manager -p /xfce4-power-manager/dpms-on-ac-sleep))) $((60*$(xfconf-query -c xfce4-power-manager -p /xfce4-power-manager/dpms-on-ac-off)))'

(This is for AC mode. You may have to adjust the argument for sleep larger.)

display xfce xfce4-power-manager

1 Answers

  1. On startup mine has xset q settings that don't match xfce's power manager settings either, like 7200 standby & 14400 off, but it still seems to react to the xfce settings anyway. So your case sounds more like a bug, but there's a workaround below.

    Changing them in xfce's power manager changes the xset settings.

    I'm not sure what to do to get the settings to match right on boot, they appear to be stored in ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-power-manager.xml but editing that file doesn't change the power manager or xset settings... though maybe a logout/login is required.

    The xfce4-settings-editor program does change the settings in the xml file and power manager, while changing the power manager settings doesn't change the xml file (at least not right away).

    Use xfconf-query

    To change the settings upon logging in (perhaps with a file in ~/.config/autostart). To set the "switch off after" / /xfce4-power-manager/dpms-on-ac-off to say 15 minutes run this:

    xfconf-query -c xfce4-power-manager -p /xfce4-power-manager/dpms-on-ac-off -s 15

    To query the current setting, omit the -s:

    xfconf-query -c xfce4-power-manager -p /xfce4-power-manager/dpms-on-ac-off
    • 1