DPMS working again after X updates, yet commented out in xorg.conf

[Nigel Henry]

On Monday 18 June 2007 09:32, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-06-17 at 19:02 +0200, Nigel Henry wrote:
> > I read a while back that xorg.conf was being deprecated. My xorg.conf has
> > "options DPMS" commented out because I want the CRT monitor to stay on.
> >
> > There were a bunch of X updates lastnight for Debian Lenny, and now my
> > commented out "options DPMS" appears to be being ignored.
> >
> > Can anyone point me towards some new file where I can once again stop
> > DPMS from putting my monitor into standby mode after about 30mins?
>
> What happens if you uncomment it and replace it with "Option DPMS Off" ?
>
>  Xav

This is bizarre, and has only happened after a bunch of X updates on Debian 
Lenny (testing). Someone on the Debian list had suggested trying.
Option     "DPMS" "False", and that didn't change anything, and I tried "Off", 
but as that's the same as false, there is still no change.

Someone else on the Debian list suggested xset -dpms, and that works ok until 
I reboot, and then goes back to default, which should be DPMS disabled, as 
the Options DPMS line in xorg.conf was commented out, but that line is being 
ignored.

I have a lot of distros that run on these 2 machines, and have commented out 
that line on them, and DPMS is disabled after doing so. The only exception is 
FC6. I commented out the line there, and it still goes into standby mode 
after 20mins or so.

I also shutdown Debian Lenny, and rebooted into Debian Etch. The same line 
in /etc/X11/xorg.conf is commented out, and xset q verifies that DPMS is 
disabled.

The only difference I can see is that, in Debian Lenny's /home/user directory 
there is a file .xscreensaver, which isn't in the Etch install. I don't know 
if it was there before, but I'm going to rename it, and see if it makes a 
difference. The same file is in /etc/X11/app-defaults, named XScreensaver, 
and is a link to XScreensaver-gl. I may change the DPMS line to false on that 
also.

Update: Tried the above with no change.

I'm clutching at straws really, to get this back to how it was working before. 
The only alternative I see, is to put a little script in KDE's autostart, 
which will run "xset -dpms" when I login to KDE.

Some time later:

Well the script works ok, but is a bit of a hack.

I should have saved to disk a list of the X updates before closing the CLI. 
Debian doesn't do this. With Fedora I can run rpm -q -a --last, and get all 
the packages that have been updated.

Thanks for your reply Xavier. I'll try and find out which X packages were 
updated, and have caused this problem.

Nigel.