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XScreenSaver uses DPMS to turn my laptop screen off. I'd like to find out why it's waking up to the prompt again. I enabled logging with log, but it shows nothing useful,

xscreensaver: 22:04:21: logging to "/tmp/f" at Thu Apr 26 22:04:21 2018

That's all that's in the log. Checking /var/log/kern.log, I see

xscreensaver: pam_ecryptfs: seteuid error

How can I debug this issue, what are the likely causes of XScreenSaver waking my display up. I'm using xscreensaver 5.36.

Evan Carroll
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2 Answers2

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I was having this issue. killing xscreensaver, and running 

xscreensaver -verbose

gave me a bunch of:

xscreensaver: 01:23:58: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:24:28: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:24:58: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:25:28: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:25:58: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:26:28: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:26:58: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:27:28: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:27:58: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:28:28: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:28:58: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:29:28: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:29:58: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:30:28: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:30:58: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver: 01:31:28: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.

I then started looking for stuff to kill. one thing was xfce4-power-manager, but that didn't do the trick.

There was no vlc window open, but I found a task running with

$ ps aux | grep vlc
poleguy   5568  0.1  0.0 1983844 12476 ?       Sl   Jan04  27:43 /usr/bin/vlc --started-from-file

it wouldn't kill normally so I did a 

kill -kill 5568

and the DEACTIVATE messages went away! Not easy to track down, so I hope this helps someone trying to track down similar issues.

My monitors will sleep tonight!

muru
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poleguy
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I found the answer in the XScreenSaver FAQ.

If you are using VLC, select "Disable Screensaver" somewhere in the VLC Preferences. (It tends to move around.) It's possible that this will disable the screen saver any time VLC is running, and not only when it is playing. I'm not sure.

For me it was under "Video" preferences. Alternatively in the file ~/.config/vlc/vlcrc you'll see a line

# Disable screensaver (boolean)
#disable-screensaver=1

Un-comment that and set it to 0, disable-screensaver=0, or you can simply run,

echo "disable-screensaver=0" >> ~/.config/vlc/vlcrc

If having completed the above does not solve your problem, perhaps you're using XFCE and running into problems with xfce4-power-manager?

Evan Carroll
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