Re: Turning off automatic screen clanking

[Ian Hastie <ianh@iahastie.clara.net>]

On Thursday 31 Jul 2003 20:55, Timothy Miller wrote:
> Herbert Pötzl wrote:
> >>Why don't we borrow a trick from my old Atari 8-bit computer.  Instead
> >>of blanking, cycle the colors.  Best of both worlds:  You save your
> >>monitor AND you get to see what's on the screen.
> >
> > hmm, ignoring the issue that modern monitors will not
> > suffer the burnin, how would it help to cycle the colors?
> > the only valid solution would be inverting the image on
> > a regular basis, and I don't think that this would be
> > appreciated ...
>
> So, if there's no point to having screen-blanking, why is it in there to
> begin with?  To protect OLD monitors from burnin?
>
> Is screen-blanking there just to make people feel better who think they
> need screen-blanking?  As I understand, it doesn't do any
> power-management stuff anyhow.

You say that, and I certainly remember it saying just about the same thing in 
the kernel configuration help.  However there is also this from the Debian 
init file /etc/init.d/console-screen.sh

    # screensaver stuff
    setterm_args=""
    if [ "$BLANK_TIME" ]; then
        setterm_args="$setterm_args -blank $BLANK_TIME"
    fi
    if [ "$BLANK_DPMS" ]; then
        setterm_args="$setterm_args -powersave $BLANK_DPMS"
    fi
    if [ "$POWERDOWN_TIME" ]; then
        setterm_args="$setterm_args -powerdown $POWERDOWN_TIME"
    fi
    if [ "$setterm_args" ]; then
        setterm $setterm_args

I know for sure it worked with 2.4 and am fairly sure it still works with 
2.6.0-test#.

-- 
Ian.