Since installing Fedora Core 2, my screen blanks 30 miuntes after starting X, and again 10 minutes later. This happens regardless of whether I am typing/moving the mouse or not. After the screen blanks, my monitor goes into standby. Other people have reported similar behaviour with FC2, and also with other distros using xorg such as Gentoo. It also appears to happen for people using different desktop environments, and at the graphical login screen.
This bug existed in xfree86 4.4.0. I submitted a bug report there: http://bugs.xfree86.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1252 ...and now my distribution (Slackware) decides to switch, so here I am posting it again :P Seems to be about forgetting to clear the timer in WaitFor.c I can't imagine anyone not having this issue in either x.org or xfree86 4.4.0. I'm surprised there hasn't been a bigger fuss about it.
I am getting this also and I am using gentoo. It seems that XFREE have fixed it so maybe if the file is still under teh old licsence we can get teh fix from them. I also wonder how come there hasnt been a bigger fuss over this.
Dawes committed the fix April 7. Draw your own conclusions on the resultant license. Some more info at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=120817, http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47922 and http://bugs.xfree86.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1252.
I'm not sure this should block the release, but I am sure it should be talked about on the next call, and to make people aware of the bug that people are noticing alot.
FYI, the fix is here: http://cvsweb.xfree86.org/cvsweb/xc/programs/Xserver/os/WaitFor.c.diff?r1=3.45&r2=3.46 Isn't is possible to integrate this patch into XOrg? I think it's kinda silly that a license change makes adding 3 if-checks impossible.
I found a work-around for this problem. In the ServerLayout section I added: Option "StandbyTime" "30" Option "SuspendTime" "0" Option "OffTime" "0" The unwanted blanking no longer occurs. Even better, once I'm logged in I can change the DPMS settings using xset (or the Control Centre in KDE) and these work as expected. Changing the settings here doesn't bring the problem back again.
David Dawes has repeatedly said any code he commits to CVS is under the XFree86 1.1 license. Many people give opinions, including lawyers, that small obvious bug fixes is not copyrightable at all, so in theory, including some small obvious bugfixes which happen to be committed by David is theoretically possible with good odds of winning a copyright lawsuit. The question is then wether such a lawsuit would be tested in court, and who is willing to find out. In all likelyhood, the odds are that such a frivolous lawsuit would cost the person suing, to spend a lot of money, and lose their case. It would also needlessly waste a lot of people's time. Why bother? Really? It's not much more difficult to get someone to read the code, and then describe the changes in a non-specific way which generically describes the problem and the solution without mentioning code specifics, then having someone else who hasn't ever looked at the XFree86 code for the fix to go ahead and re-implement it. Nobody is going to just wholesale copy code from XFree86 to X.Org however in which there is any question about legal issues pertaining to copyright, trademark, patent, or other intellectual property law.
In xc/programs/Xserver/os/WaitFor.c, at the end of the file, there is a function named SetDPMSTimers. Three timers are checked in sequence; if the time value is greater than zero, then the timers are set accordingly. For each of these timers, if this condition is NOT met, then they need to be cancelled. (Someone else needs to implement this, I've just looked at the code.)
Tavin Cole was kind enough to (re-)implement a fix. Please take a look at it. The direct link is http://bugs.gentoo.org/attachment.cgi?id=43761 and more info is at http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47922#c36.
Created attachment 1323 [details] [review] cleanroomed patch from Gentoo
Comment on attachment 1323 [details] [review] cleanroomed patch from Gentoo oh man, please please include this for 6.8.2, it's been the biggest source of annoyance for Ubuntu users
Comment on attachment 1323 [details] [review] cleanroomed patch from Gentoo Approval denied in the 2004-12-06 release-wranglers call, we're taking the the patch in bug 1934 instead.
since the patch in 1394 got accepted, despite the fact that 1394 is a dup of 792, close this as a dup of 1394 as the patch in 1394 is the relevant one *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 1394 ***
Wrong dup.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 1934 ***
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