SOLVED: Can't blank/lock screen after 30 mins - xset s off not working

Question

I want the monitor screen to blank after 30 minutes of idleness and password lock it.  The password lock works fine, but the screen blanks after 10 minutes.
Here is what I have in my ~/.xinitrc
xset s off &
xset dpms 0 1800 3600 &
xautolock -time 30 -locker slock -notify 30 &
Is there something I overlooked?
Last edited by bpont (2011-12-17 18:02:47)

Answer 1

karol wrote:
Not sure what's wrong with your setup, works for me:
[karol@black ~]$ xset s default
[karol@black ~]$ xset -q | grep -A2 "Screen Saver"
Screen Saver:
prefer blanking: yes allow exposures: yes
timeout: 600 cycle: 600
[karol@black ~]$ xset s off
[karol@black ~]$ xset -q | grep -A2 "Screen Saver"
Screen Saver:
prefer blanking: yes allow exposures: yes
timeout: 0 cycle: 600
For some reason you're using the default timeout even though you have 'xset s off &' in your .xinitrc.
I don't know what exactly 'xautolock -time 30 -locker slock -notify 30 &' does, try commenting it out and see if it changes anything.
If you're still stuck, post the whole ~/.xinitrc.
I did your above test which gave me the same results as you.  The thing is, whenever I reboot, that setting will be lost.
I think what I'll try next is moving the xset s off command from ~/.xinitrc into ~/.fluxbox/startup
I will leave xautolock -time 30 -locker slock -notify 30 & in ~/.xinitrc for now.  By the way, what that line does is lock my display after 30 minutes using the 'slock' package and notifies me with a 30 second system alarm warning before it does so.  That way I can press my keyboard or move my mouse to avoid locking my display.
Edit: Actually, what I ended up doing was simply changing the ordering of commands in my ~/.xinitrc from:
xset s off &
xset dpms 0 1800 3600 &
xautolock -time 30 -locker slock -notify 30 &
to
xset dpms 0 1800 3600 &
xset s off &
xautolock -time 30 -locker slock -notify 30 &
and that solved the problem by changing the timeout to 0...not really sure why the ordering of commands matters here, but it worked so I'm changing this thread to SOLVED.
Karol, thanks for your help in troubleshooting this with me.
Last edited by bpont (2011-12-17 18:02:08)