GNOME Screensaver: December 2009 Archives

Note: Turns out my screensaver "fix" described below didn't work.

Click back a few entries and you'll know about my recent GNOME Screensaver issue in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

First thing: I did a screensaver test over the past two days (it went a day longer due to my daughter being sick and home from school and the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop being at the office, plugged into an external monitor due to the screen physically dying a slow, unrelated death).

The result of that test is that I seemingly CAN get a form of "screensaving" to work without totally losing both the keyboard and mouse after a period of time, requiring a hard reset to bring the laptop back to life.

Second thing: When I came back to the machine this morning, the new Ubuntu way of notifying users of a software update had plopped an Update Manager window on my desktop, a screen shot of which I present above.

This GNOME Screensaver bug-fix seems to have nothing to do with my problem, that being the screensaver killing both keyboard and mouse after a time on my Intel-video-running machine.

But maybe, just maybe it'll make things better. Could make them worse. I haven't quit out of X or rebooted (or even installed the update yet).

Meanwhile, how did I get the screensaver to work yet NOT kill the whole machine?

First, under System - Preferences - Screensaver, I unchecked the box next to "Activate Screensaver When Computer Is Idle":

I've never understood why GNOME sets screensaver preferences in the System - Preferences - Screensaver dialog but then has further screensaver settings in the System - Preferences - Power Management dialog (which is also accessible from the Power Management button on the Screensaver dialog box).

I always wondered if these two screensaver setting somehow conflicted. I still don't know. But I set the screensaver preference in the Power Management dialog box:

Thus far that seems to work. Like I say above, the bug report that prompted this update of the GNOME Screensaver doesn't appear to have anything to do with my issue. This bug is about the screensaver not activating when it's supposed to, and my issue is about the screensaver eventually shutting down the keyboard and mouse.

But I've learned that when packages are updated to fix one thing, there are often regressions in other areas.

Right now I'm going to do the update, reboot and then see how the screensaver runs.

I did say recently that I needed a break from Ubuntu, but getting this installation back to where it was before the most recent Xorg update.