Laney's blog

A little while ago I blogged about problems that I was experiencing in Ubuntu, one of which was that the display would blank regardless of what was set in gnome-power-manager (System -> Preferences -> Power Management). I'm happy to report that I found a workaround for this, thanks to Michael Holloway on the ubuntu-uk mailing list. If you find that your display is blanking inexplicably, try appending this to your xorg.conf (hit alt-f2 and type gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf):

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "BlankTime" "0"
Option "StandbyTime" "0"
Option "SuspendTime" "0"
Option "OffTime" "0"
EndSection

Save and restart your computer (or log out and restart X by hitting ctrl-alt-backspace), and everything should be fixed. Play a video and leave it and marvel at how you don't have to move the mouse once every 10 minutes to keep it displaying! Also, I noted that on Xubuntu gnome-screensaver wasn't started by default, meaning that no power management settings would work any more. This is easily solved by going to Settings -> Autostarted Applications and adding an item to start /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver when you login.

Here's the launchpad bug for anyone interested in tracking the issue.