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I want my screen to stay EXACTLY the same after it's finished booting, forever, which means I NEVER want it to go black, and I NEVER want to see that clock overlay appearing over the top of my username selection login dialog (it's a VM - has no real monitor, so all this blanking and screen saving garbage makes no sense). Basically - when something goes wrong, like a kernel problem, I can't see on the console what that was, since it's gone black and only shows up if a key is pressed, which (in the case of kernel issues) doesn't always still work.

I've already included this on my boot line: consoleblank=0

I've tried this:- gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay 0

I've even tried this:- rm -rf /usr/bin/xdg-screensaver /usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/orca/scripts/apps/gnome-screensaver-dialog /usr/lib64/libxcb-screensaver* /usr/lib64/pkgconfig/xcb-screensaver* /usr/lib64/totem/plugins/screensaver /usr/libexec/gsd-screensaver-proxy

I'm in runlevel 5 - I'd prefer not to go back to 3 ( which consoleblank=0 works for ).

Anyone got any clues? Basically - I never want to see this timewasting dumb idea again Annoying screen that will not die

(or it's evil cousin - the near-totally black version [go mousey, you at least escaped the blackout!!]):- Only the mouse pointer survives this pure evil black

cnd
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  • `gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay 0` who did you run this as? GDM runs GNOME Shell as its own user – muru Dec 16 '20 at 06:56
  • I ran ```gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay 0 ``` as root - this is the login screen - there IS no user yet. What does that gsettings thing do? Add something to a file someplace? Set a key? Maybe if I know what it applies to, I can find the similar place that controls the login phase, and do the same to that? As a clue: gsettings fails via SSH, so that's WHY it didn't work of course (it applied to my session after I logged in to the console - but I want this to apply BEFORE anyone logs in to the console). – cnd Dec 16 '20 at 07:08
  • There IS a user - GDM's user. Everything runs as some user, including GDM. GDM's user is called `gdm` as well. – muru Dec 16 '20 at 07:13
  • Cool - thanks. Yes, I can find the gdm user, but there don't appear to be settings for it? What is "greeter" - that smells suspiciously like the cause of the problem? – cnd Dec 16 '20 at 07:16
  • https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/273914/70524 – muru Dec 16 '20 at 07:17
  • @muru - perhaps close, but nothing in that post works - CentOS refuses to let me log in as gdm, and none of the suggested commands exists on CentOS. I also adjusted gdm to a login shell and gave it a password - that too blocks my login (logs in OK, but immediately logs out again) - maybe related: CentOS 8 uses Gnome 3.32+ - which no longer uses gconf. – cnd Dec 16 '20 at 07:26
  • Normally `gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay 0` should be run as the user you want the settings to be reflected to. – Reda Salih Dec 16 '20 at 10:56
  • @RedaSalih - since this is the LOGIN screen, there is of course NO USER... and I did try doing that for the gdm "user" (the process that runs the greeter), but it has no effect. – cnd Dec 18 '20 at 01:28
  • Ok, have you tried to set it under dconf directly ? – Reda Salih Dec 18 '20 at 01:35

2 Answers2

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Update: I rebooted and it appears that the "delete all possible culprits" trick stuck and worked:

rm -rf  /usr/bin/xdg-screensaver /usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/orca/scripts/apps/gnome-screensaver-dialog /usr/lib64/libxcb-screensaver* /usr/lib64/pkgconfig/xcb-screensaver* /usr/lib64/totem/plugins/screensaver /usr/libexec/gsd-screensaver-proxy

Not elegant, but, problem solved...

I also posted a bug report in gdm settings, because it supports this setting:-

non-working options

but gdm itself does not honor it, and there's no way to change the settings for gdm itself (it's a user which you can't log in as), so gdm should respect the settings of the user that spawned it (root).

cnd
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  • Update - this problem returned after a reboot again... but I did finally manage to get something to "stick" by overwriting the greeter settings from my root settings after using the dconf GUI to disable screen saving. ```cp /root/.config/dconf/user /usr/share/gdm/greeter-dconf-defaults;service gdm restart``` ... but unfortunately this breaks ```dconf update``` which is no longer able to write to the defaults file, making it impossible to remove the list of users from the login screen. If only we could go back in time and prevent the conception of whatever idiot decided to make dconf binary.. – cnd Dec 18 '20 at 01:33
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I will suggest to set it directly under dconf db, :

Create the following conf file : /etc/dconf/db/local.d/01-centos-event-settings

[org/gnome/desktop/session]
idle-delay=uint32 0

Update db : dconf update

Check if the new value has been set :

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay

And also be sure that selinux is in permissive mode.

Reda Salih
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