every so often, screen just goes black

[Adam Pribyl]

On Sun, 31 May 2009, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:

>
> David <dgboles at comcast.net> writes:
>> Maybe an Xorg default.
>>
>> http://linuxreviews.org/howtos/power/xorg_dpms/
>
> Curious, Xorg does appear to be initialized with the DPMS timers all set
> to "0".
>
> $ xset q
> ...
> DPMS (Energy Star):
>  Standby: 0    Suspend: 0    Off: 0
>  DPMS is Enabled
>  Monitor is On

This is "normal" behavior of g-p-m for a long time. It manages timeouts by 
itself setting usuall Xorg DPMS to 0. I've reported a bug 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543956 some time ago, but this 
is probably the best it can do. This has nothing to do with this 
problem, unless Xorg changed its behavior and is kicking in DPMS at 0, 
instead "never".

> Looks like gnome and Xorg both are trying to DPMS blank the screen.
>
> -wolfgang

Adam Pribyl