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I have a laptop where I tried xscreensaver auto blanking screen after 1 minute of idle time and even though everything seems idle it doesn't blank the screen.

So then I ran this command to blank the screen manually:

xset dpms force off

This works but after a minute or two the laptop wakes up and the screen lights up again. How do I debug this? I want to know what process or event is happening that is making the screen turn on again after I manually turn off the monitors. Perhaps it's the same thing that is preventing xscreensaver from blanking the screen also?

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As suggested by the xscreensaver manpage, launching xscreensaver -verbose (or setting this preference in the .xscreensaver file) should give you the answer.

Walking down the manpage, you'll also understand why your manual setting with xset is not efficient for long :

if you have used xset(1) to change your power management settings, then xscreensaver will override those changes with the values specified in ~/.xscreensaver (or with its built-in defaults, if there is no ~/.xscreensaver file yet.)

And by the way, don't forget that, with laptops, some power-saving features are often only tuneable at BIOS level.

If you're using a laptop, don't be surprised if changing the DPMS settings has no effect: many laptops have monitor power-saving behavior built in at a very low level that is invisible to Unix and X. On such systems, you can typically adjust the power-saving delays only by changing settings in the BIOS in some hardware-specific way.

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