[JeffElkins]

I have a Mac Mini (dual-boot OS X/Kubuntu 8.04) attached to a Panasonic 52" LCD as my media center and am experiencing a weird problem. After a variable amount of time, the display goes blank while audio continues to play. It's connected via a dvi->hdmi cable.

I thought that it might be a KDE problem, so I configured XBMC to start directly, but that didn't solve the problem. I've run both svn and an install from the xbmc 8.04 repository with the same results. Oddly, OS X on the same machine runs xbmc w/o problems, so I'm thinking this is a Linux issue. Keyboard and remote keypresses don't "wake up" the display...once blank it's blank until a reboot.

Any ideas out there?

[drewjacks0n]

Hi Jeff-

I had the exact problem for a while. I eventually solved it by doing the following:

1) Ditched Gnome (therefore ruling it out as a culprit)
2) Removed any mention of DPMS in my xorg.conf
3) Set my gdm session to Xclient script
4) Linked .xsession to .xinitrc
5) Put the following in my .xinitrc

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
xset -dpms &
xset s off &
setterm -blank 0 -powersave off -powerdown 0  &
xbmc -fs &
# this sets my nvidia color settings
/home/chrisk/scripts/nv_set_color.sh &
exec fluxbox

I no longer have the problem of my screen going to sleep, or "dying". I think that is everything I tried.. It was a while ago but I eventually got it figured out... Let me know how it goes!

[JeffElkins]

Thanks! I'll give this a shot and report back.

[JeffElkins]

No joy yet

I'm not a Gnome/GDM user so I futzed around with the instructions above and may well have misapplied them.

1. I disabled KDE bootup by moving the rc2.d/S13kdm to K13kdm, booting to a commandline.

2. I created an /etc/xinit.d/XboxMediaCenter file and symlinked it to /etc/rc2.d/S99XboxMediaCenter. it contains:

#!/bin/sh
export PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin
export HOME=/
case "$1" in
start) echo -n "Starting XboxMediaCenter"
/usr/local/bin/xbmc.sh
esac
exit

/usr/local/bin/xbmc.sh contains:

#!/bin/bash
xset -dpms &
xset s off &
setterm -blank 0 -powersave off -powerdown 0 &
/usr/bin/X11/xinit /home/jeff/XBMC/BUILD/XboxMediaCenter -q &
irexec -d /root/.lircrc &

So is my startup screwed up?

[JeffElkins]

I didn't mention this, but XBMC's menu can stay up for hours, it's only when a video is played that the screen will die.

[drewjacks0n]

Here is what I suggest:

Restore your KDM start script.

Remove the XboxMediaCenter start script you created

Reboot, and in KDM, change your session to "Xclient Script" (or something similar) (this will tell KDM to execute your .xsession script in your homedirectoty (~/.xsession). I created an .xinitrc file and symlink'd it to .xsession (ln -s .xinitrc .xsession).

I hope that is a bit more clear. The key here is to change your session to use the xclient scripts, this will allow you to disable kde/gnome

[JeffElkins]

Thanks again for your suggestions. No joy yet, but I'm still working on it.

[JeffElkins]

Just a followup to report that my problem is solved. It turns out that running 8.04 on my HTPC was the root of my problems. For some reason any xset command sent to xserver.xorg was ignored. I installed 7.10 server, then xserver-xorg, then the Intel i810 driver and my living-room HTPC (Mac mini) is working perfectly.