Disabling screen blanking in xorg

Nerd Notes

I’m writing this down because I always forget how to do it. Usually your window manager would take care of this for you but here in the embedded Linux world, we don’t always use a window manager.

There’s a lot of detailed information here but in a nutshell, put the following code into the Monitor section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf

        Option          "DPMS"

and then, put this in the ServerLayout section:

        Option          "BlankTime"     "0"
        Option          "StandbyTime"   "0"
        Option          "SuspendTime"   "0"
        Option          "OffTime"       "0"

PS. I could have used the “NODPMS” option but this way leaves it open in future to set some screen blanking timeouts if I so desire.

6 thoughts on “Disabling screen blanking in xorg”

  1. Half an hour googling and lots of trying to turn off screen blanking. Remming the dpms line as said elsewhere didnt work. Your hack did – cheers

  2. You can also put that in Section “SeverFlags” if you have multiple layouts (eg: twinview and dualview on Nvidia cards) that you switch between without having to cut’n'paste it into each ServerLayout.

    Sadly, Option “NoPM” “true” doesn’t seem to work by itself. It should also be noted that at least in Fedora Core 6, when the driver blanks, the vncserver module won’t respond until you wake it up again.

    Cheers!

    p.s.: this site was ranked 2 in google for: ‘xorg disable blanking’

  4. This didn’t actually work on my setup for some reason (I’m also using an NVidia card). I’ve had to add the command “xset -dpms” to my X startup scripts to full disable DPMS.

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  6. Since this still comes up high in google searches, I thought I’d add some info.

    For recent versions of Xorg, there is no longer an xorg.conf file. Everything is automatically figured out. Instead of creating an xorg.conf file, one can create a configuration file in directory /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d
    I created on named 01-disable-dpms-off.conf, then put the following in the file:
    Section “ServerFlags”
    Option “BlankTime” “0″
    Option “StandbyTime” “0″
    Option “SuspendTime” “0″
    Option “OffTime” “0″
    EndSection

    This did the trick for me on Fedora 13, which has Xorg version 1.8.0.

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