Disable the Linux screen blanking

By | August 22, 2009

If you want to disable X screen blanking (aka. disable the X screensaver) that comes up unexpectedly while you’re watching a movie in MPlayer, all you have to do is

setterm -powersave off -blank 0

To make the change permanent, add the following to your ~/.xinitrc file:

setterm -blank 0 -powersave off -powerdown 0
xset s off

One thought on “Disable the Linux screen blanking

  1. Liam Quin

    It’s better to file a bug against the movie player (even better, include a patch!).

    If you disable power saving altogether, you are wasting electricity, and also may risk burning patterns into your monitor – even LCD screens will burn eventually.

    You could rename mplayer to mplayer.original and make a shell-script wrapper, e.g.

    #! /bin/sh

    xset s off
    mplayer.original “$@”
    xset s on

    Reply

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