Better screensaver or DPMS for x.org: discard tiny mouse motion

Dâniel Fraga fragabr at gmail.com
Wed May 7 11:16:29 PDT 2008


	I noticed that the built-in screen saver from x.org turns off
with a single pixel mouse movement. It would be more intelligent if the
screensaver turned off just when there was a mouse movement more than a
few pixels. What do you think? This critic was already made before:

http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/faq.html#hysteresis

#
Sometimes (but not always) my monitor doesn't go into power-saving mode.

Short answer: your mouse is getting bumped. Cats, trucks, doors, and
earthquakes are likely culprits.

Slightly longer answer: XScreenSaver is responsible for blanking and
locking the screen and drawing pretty pictures. However, the X server
itself is responsible for powering down the monitor. XScreenSaver is
smart enough to ignore tiny mouse motions: if your mouse only moves by
a couple of pixels, XScreenSaver ignores that: it only un-blanks the
screen when the mouse motion is large. However, the X server doesn't do
that: even a single pixel of motion will cause it to power your monitor
back on (or prevent your monitor from powering down in the first place.)

The only way to fix this would be to modify the X server to do what
XScreenSaver does, and ignore small mouse motions for power-management
idle-detection purposes.

	***

	So could you modify the X server DPMS part to avoid this? It's
really annoying when I go back and see my monitor "on" wasting energy.

	Thank you!

-- 
Linux 2.6.25: Funky Weasel is Jiggy wit it
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