It is generally good practice for computer users to turn off their displays after a period of inactivity. This is good for two reasons. People walking by your computer (for example, at work) cannot immediately see what is on your screen. In addition, the monitor or display is off, which can save you money on your energy bills.
Of course, there are times when you don’t want to turn off the display. Online video is not always recorded as an “action,†so even if you enjoy watching the latest YouTube or playing a game in your web browser, the display may dim at the wrong time.
In the previous article, we discussed a handy utility called Caffeine that keeps your computer awake when certain conditions are met. This is a scalpel-like approach. For this article, we’ll use something less sophisticated. Here, we’ll show you how to adjust the power and screen saver settings so that now your monitor dims or turns off only when the system is turned off.
The first step is to open the control panel. In Ubuntu, this can be done by selecting the System Settings option from the System menu.
You should now see a fairly standard set of control panel options.
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We’ll be using a control panel called Brightness & Lock, which you’ll find (more than likely) in the top row.
You should now see something like this.
We want to set two settings so that our system does not turn off the display after a period of inactivity and that the screen does not dim to save power. First, uncheck the box next to Dim screen to save power as shown below.
Then change the Turn off screen when inactive for: option to Never.
After setting these two parameters everything should work correctly, but you may find that not everything is as it seems. In Ubuntu 12.04, this could be due to the splash screen. What screen saver? Despite the looks, it is, although the screensaver control panel is no longer there. Instead, a blank screen appears (this is different from turning off the display). To configure this, we need to first install the XScreensaver package. To do this, enter sudo apt-get install xscreensaver into a terminal window.
Now open the XScreensaver control panel. It doesn’t appear in system preferences, but if you type splash screen in the Unity Dash, you’ll see it.
The first time you do this, you may find a warning window that the screen saver daemon is already running.
Go ahead and click to turn off the Gnome-Screensaver daemon (which is actually just a screen dimming feature). Now enable the XScreensaver daemon.
You should now see the main XScreensaver controls.
Now (finally!) Change the Mode: setting to <disable splash screen (found in the dropdown menu).
Now close the XScreensaver controls. Everything is now ready. The screen should not go black or dim (due to the changes we made to the brightness and lock control panel) and, thanks to replacing Gnome-Screensaver with the newly installed and configured XScreensaver, this should also be taken care of.
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