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I have been having a lot of problems with xscreensaver and DPMS. A few months back DPMS stopped working and randomly xscreensaver would randomly not work as well. (Arch linux, xfce4, 4.8.7-1-ARCH)

As far as xscreensaver I tracked the issue to xfce4-power-manager it was sending some kind of commands to xscreensaver preventing it from running. (found a tip to this on an xscreensaver faq). Killed xfce4-power-manager and now xscreensaver activates properly.

Now I am back to my bigger issue of DPMS not working. Few things that i know I will be asked:

  1. xset dpms force suspend/standby/off run manually works perfect on all four of my monitors every time.

  2. xset q returns the following: 

    Standby: 0    Suspend: 300    Off: 2100
DPMS is Enabled
Monitor is On

  3. I have tried to set DPMS settings in various places (xset, xscreensaver-demo config, etc) to no avail.

  4. xscreensaver does NOT keep asking for password as if input was being detected, this leads me to believe there is nothing coming in on /dev/input/event* - I did evtest /dev/input/event0-16 and didn't see anything popping up randomly that would cause this. I believe xscreensaver would be constantly showing the password pop up if input was the reason my monitors don't blank.

Being I have four monitors this is a real nightmare as I am constantly having to turn them all off and back on all the time and constantly leaving them on overnight by accident.

I will provide any info required.

droid guy
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  • There's probably nothing new here, right? I have the same issue, xscreensaver blanking works, but even if I explicitly disable/enable it dpms does not kick in. Except sometimes it just starts working after couple of days of uptime. And then after few days it stops again. The only thing I just found out that I could try are `-verbose` and `-logverbose` parameters for X so I'll see if there's any debug output there. Just for the record, I'm running this overnight: `while sleep 5; do xset dpms force off; done` that I can Ctrl-C in the morning. – nert Jun 10 '20 at 13:30

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