Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 54230
Having trouble turning on DPMS
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:37:27 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20010913 Description of problem: Under RedHat 6.0, I ran my ATI Mach 64 XFree86 version 3 that came with the distribution. I managed to turn on monitor power saving by setting: Option "power_saver" in the Device section of XF86Config, as documented in the XF86_Accel man page. But under RedHat 7.1, I am undable to set power saving from XF86Config. The man page for XF86_Accel says to do the same thing as 6.0 did. But under 7.1 xset q reports: DPMS (Energy Star): Standby: 10 Suspend: 10 Off: 10 DPMS is Disabled (Notice the odd Standby, Suspend and Off times. If I run startx from a virtual console as root, power saving is STILL turned off, but the times are reasonable values.) I tried setting: Option "DPMS" in the Monitor section as the XF86Config man page says to do. But then the X server wont start, complaining that DPMS is not a valid Monitor Option string. (I guess XF86Config documentation is for 4.0 only. Perhaps that should be mentioned explicitly.) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Start Mach64 X server either with or without Option "power_saver" 2. xset -q 3. Actual Results: Power saving is turned off by default. Expected Results: Power saving should be turned on by default, as documented in the man pages. Or either DPMS or power_saver options should turn it on. Additional info: I guess I can work around this by putting appropriate xset commands into my login, but this used to work. I'm wondering if a bug has crept in, or if I'm doing something wrong. Mostly I'm logging this bug to learn the answer, and in the hope that the documentation will be made to reflect reality.
Make sure you are running an up to date system with all package updates applied. XFree86 DPMS works fine, there is no bug in X. In particular, there were bugs in xscreensaver, and gnome control center with respect to DPMS. Also keep in mind there are 2 different XFree86 config files. One for 3.3.6, and one for 4.x. The -4 one is for 4.x - as described on the manpage. Hopefully this will help you get it working properly. If not, try our mailing lists.
Although I have not tested this, I expect it's a matter of my using the un-updated xscreensaver and control-center that came on the CD. Thanks very much for providing the crucial clue. I found the bug report on xscreensaver/control-center in Bugzilla, and know that all DPMS bases are belong to them. :-)
By the way: My testing at home failed. I turned on DPMS in the xscreensaver section of control center, but DPMS is still disabled. I think this is because, if the bug is fixed in xscreensaver-3.32-2 with control-center-1.4.0.1-3 as implied in bugzilla bug 40889, those versions are NOT what shipped with the 7.1 CD, nor are they available on the errata page (Not under RH 7.1 bug fixes, nor package enhancements.) They are not available on the RedHat updates FTP site. At least not under any 7.1 designated directory. The 7.2 directories, and beta/roswell were inaccessible to me. I guess this is why 40889 is still open rather than labeled fixed. So
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 40889 ***