[SOLVED] unable to stop screen "blanking"

windowbreaker · 2008-11-12 00:52:44

I've been researching how to disable the screen blanking of virtual terminals. By virtual terminals, I am referring to the non-X virtual consoles vc/1 thru vc/6.

I have the most recent updates installed via

pacman -Syu

I've read the following recent thread on the ArchLinux forums
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=47993, which states that /etc/rc.sysinit used to contain a

setterm -blank 15

command, which has subsequently been removed.

I verified that the setterm command is not issued by any of my startup scripts. However, all of my virtual terminals will go blank after some short period of in-activity. Although I haven't "clocked" the time period, it is about 15 minutes.

If I manually login to vc/1, and issue

setterm -blank 0

then it will no longer blank.

I have also googled this issue, only to find references to the "setterm" command, which in this case, doesn't seem to be the problem.

My question is how to cause all virtual terminals to never blank. I know how to add the command to disable blanking to a login script, but I would like this behavior on all virtual terminals whether anyone is logged in or not.

Thanks in advance for any help with this.

Last edited by windowbreaker (2008-11-13 01:51:54)

Misfit138 · 2008-11-12 02:22:33

This should work.

windowbreaker · 2008-11-12 02:26:41

Thanks for the response. However, this is for a machine that does not have X installed. What is making the virtual terminals blank? It must be configured somewhere.

windowbreaker · 2008-11-13 01:51:34

The way I solved this was to add

setterm -blank 0

to /etc/rc.local. I verified that it applies to all virtual consoles and keeps them from blanking out ever.

I'm posting it here hoping it will help someone else.

Misfit138 · 2008-11-13 02:12:48

Oops. Sorry, I should have read your post completely.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-11-12 00:52:44

[SOLVED] unable to stop screen "blanking"

#2 2008-11-12 02:22:33

Re: [SOLVED] unable to stop screen "blanking"

#3 2008-11-12 02:26:41

Re: [SOLVED] unable to stop screen "blanking"

#4 2008-11-13 01:51:34

Re: [SOLVED] unable to stop screen "blanking"

#5 2008-11-13 02:12:48

Re: [SOLVED] unable to stop screen "blanking"

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