F10 -- can't enable DPMS power save

Sam Varshavchik mrsam at courier-mta.com
Wed Dec 3 03:00:15 UTC 2008


After upgrading to Fedora 10, I can't seem to set one of my laptops to 
automatically power its LCD backlight off, when idle.

The only settings that I can find in Gnome menus are System → Preferences → 
Look And Feel → Screen Saver, which runs gnome-screensaver. I have "Activate 
screensaver when computer is idle" checked. Under "Power Management" I have 
"Put display to sleep when inactive for 20 minutes", "Set display brightness 
to: 0%", and "Dim display when idle" checked.

However, the laptop's LCD backlight stays off.

"xset q" shows the following:

DPMS (Energy Star):
  Standby: 0    Suspend: 0    Off: 0
  DPMS is Enabled
  Monitor is On

So, despite the screensaver settings, x.org still has its DPMS knobs turned 
off. After RTFMing, I manually add the following to xorg.conf:

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option      "BlankTime" "20"
        Option      "StandbyTime" "20"
        Option      "SuspendTime" "20"
        Option      "OffTime" "20"
EndSection

and

        Option      "dpms" "yes"

in the Monitor settings. After restarting X, xset still shows that the DPMS 
knobs are off.

"xset force dpms off" turns off the backlight immediately, so x.org 
definitely knows what to do with my hardware, it just doesn't seem to do it 
automatically. This laptop is driven by x.org's radeon driver, the chip is 
RV250.


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