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Izzy
Asked: 2012-09-20 13:45:27 +0800 CST

Is there an easy way to (temporarily) disable the display timeout?

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In KDE 3.5 there was the powermanager plugin for the kicker panel, where one could easily switch between different profiles. So normally, I want the display to go to sleep after, say, 10 minutes of user inactivity. But when I watch a video, this should not happen.

I know I could go via the KDE launcher, settings, powermanager, and change the setting. But this is too complicated for daily use.

I also know there are those activities. But I don't want to change background etc., just the display timeout. Furthermore, when I tried this, many of the open apps simply crashed and got restarted. I simply don't like this approach.

Preferably, it would be something to plug-in to the panel, which opens a menu to select the profile -- as it was with KDE 3.5. Is there a similar solution I missed?

display

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Just found a possible solution:

    Keep the Screen on

    For this, there's the little applet caffeine:

    Caffeine

    It sits in the tray, and you click it once to de-activate screen saver etc. Click it again, and it restores it. As the screenshot of its configuration shows, you can have it started automatically on login, and even deactivate the screen automatically on configured conditions (e.g. whenever playing Flash or Quake, or whenever certain programs are running). More details can be found in this article, including detailed instructions for installation and configuration.

    Though the screenshots show it in Unity, it seems to work in KDE as well. I just installed it, so I cannot give reports yet (feel free to ask if you need). To install:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:caffeine-developers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install caffeine

    Again, the article speaks of Ubuntu 11.10 -- in my case, it installed smoothly on 12.04 with above 3 steps.

    Power profiles

    For the other stuff (power management profiles), those interested in might want to take a look at the Jupiter Applet, which offers this and, additionally, switching between different screen modes and resolutions:

    Jupiter

    This also comes in its own PPA:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/jupiter
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install jupiter

    Those with an EeePC might add:

    sudo apt-get install jupiter-support-eee
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  2. If you are happy to use the command line, then you might like lightsOn.sh It is a shell script that I've been using for years to deal with this problem. It is almost as fast as a panel plug-in: (seven key strokes: open terminal, lig{tab} then Enter) and once I'm done Ctrl+c

    I usually paste in all relevant code, but:

    wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kodx/lightsOn/master/lightsOn.sh -O /usr/local/bin/lightsOn.sh

    is probably more useful, (and I'm not certain if GNU GPL version 2.0 lets me do that.)

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