Yesterday I installed XBMC Live on my new Asus E35M1-M Pro. I was hoping to use the built in AMD Radeon card with XBMC, but we all know how that goes. Therefore I'm recycling my NVidia GeForce GT 220 video card for some great HD playback.
Everything is going great, this is a keyboard and mouse free setup, using my Moneual Moncaso 312B case and Logitech Harmony remote, but for some reason XBMC Live keeps putting the display to sleep. I've noticed this yesterday while trying to watch a TV Show, after about 15 minutes the TV goes black saying there is no input signal. As soon as the screen goes black I just hit ctrl (or really anything) on the keyboard and the screen comes right back. Audio never stops while the screen is black.
I've been looking around for solutions to this, and haven't been able to find much. I'll admit that I'm not certain what my search terms to get some better results would even be.
I have tried removing the Options "DPMS" from my xorg.conf file, but that doesn't seem to do anything. Does anyone have any thoughts on how to correct this?
After much searching and experimentation, I figured out that this issue is actually caused by fluxbox, which is installed underneath XBMC. For some reason, on this hardware fluxbox sets the display to go black after about 10 minutes of inactivity. This is irrespective of the options shown or set by xset from the command line.
The solution was to simply uninstall fluxbox with
Code:
sudo apt-get remove fluxbox
After that command and a reboot my media center no longer goes black during shows.
Another thing you can do is set the NODPMS option in X. Although that's system-wide. That would go in the Monitor section of xorg.conf.
I did try turning DPMS off by removing
from my xorg.conf file. This didn't do anything. Then I tried turning it off by running
(from an SSH session after running 'export DISPLAY=:0)
Neither of these options worked for me. I read on a thread from answers.launchpad.net (
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+so...ion/153814) that someone was having extremely similar issues to mine and it was related to fluxbox. In their case as well turning off DPMS and the screensaver, as far as X is related, didn't seem to have any effect.
I'm not a fluxbox user, I used to use OpenBox on Gentoo but that was about it, so I may be missing something. And I should point out that I didn't try to troubleshoot and find out what in fluxbox is causing the issue, could just be a simple setting. This is a home theater appliance for me, I only SSH into it when I need to and have web interfaces on my other apps there (SickBeard and Sabnzbd) so I don't need a GUI aside from XBMC. For that reason, simply removing fluxbox is a perfectly viable option for me.
If your experience with DPMS is related to this particular issue and you know how to resolve it while keeping fluxbox installed, however, I'm sure someone else down the road would appreciate some instructions.
Thanks for your reply.
ryanjharter Wrote:I did try turning DPMS off by removing from my xorg.conf file. This didn't do anything. Then I tried turning it off by running (from an SSH session after running 'export DISPLAY=:0)
Removing the DPMS option won't do anything. In order for that to stop you need to put
Options "NoDPMS"
in its place (if I remember right.)
X3lectric Wrote:DPMS must be supported by TV as well the /etc/X11/Xorg.conf is where you can find or add it to.
read https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DPM...urning_off
and
http://linux.die.net/man/5/xorg.conf
DO NOT REMOVE FLUXBOX FROM XBMC-LIVE, do it at own peril.
Thanks for the info X3lectric.
In regards to the first link you posted, I did try xset -dpms;xset s off to turn off the screensaver and dpms, but this had no effect. I would run those commands, start a tv show, and in 10 minutes the screen would go blank.
As for the second link, it looks to me like the following section is what would be useful:
Quote:Option BlankTime time
sets the inactivity timeout for the blank phase of the screensaver. time is in minutes. This is equivalent to the Xorg server's -s flag, and the value can be changed at run-time with xset(1). Default: 10 minutes.
I have not tried explicitly setting the BlankTime, but are you suggesting that I should add
to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file?
Also, just for my own curiosity, would you mind elaborating on why I shouldn't remove fluxbox from xbmc live? It seems that ubuntu boots directly into XBMC, using the upstart job which starts X and XBMC, and doesn't even use fluxbox. I had assumed that fluxbox was only there for maintenance purposes. I removed fluxbox last night and things seem to be working fine. When I startx from the command line now I just get the terminal in the top left with no window manager, which is fine for me. Is XBMC using it, or potentially using it, some other place that I'm not aware of?
any dpms options should be added under the monitor section, im sure if you google around also find a proper way of dealing with this., The other way is to disable power saving on your TV see what happens.
fluxbox is just a window manager, xbmc may now require it for extra functionality directly or indirectly (never did need it before addons were introduced), if you are ok without extra functionality then its up to you.
I had the same problem, solved it by the following procedure
edited the xorg file
sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf
under "serverlayout" i have added the following line
Option "BlankTime" "0"
under "monitor" i have changed the following line
Option "DPMS" "off"
There was no need to deinstall Fluxbox in my case
Witch is great because i use it a lot with the launcher plugin