screensaver

[cast-fish]

Hello,

can you confirm what causes a SCREENSAVER to come into action?

i realize you SET a time for when you want the saver to start up
.Mine is 1 minute.

i presume that during that 1 minute the screen must be STATIC without any movement of video etc and ALSO the user
has not made any mouse or keyboard activity during that same minute? 

(or is it just mouse activity + static screen?)

is that correct?

-------------------------------------------------


i have also been having great difficulty understanding definitions of POWER FEATURES in operating systems.

For example, definitions such as
"what is an idle computer defined as....?"
This question seems to have various answers with the most
popular definitions being below ....

1) a computer is considered idle if the screen saver is active.

2) A windows 7 computer is considered to be idle if there has not been user interaction via the mouse or keyboard for a given time (10  minutes)  and if the hard drives and processors have also been idle more than 90% of that time

Just for the record, i can't see anytime that a computer would meet that criteria, it's very rare for cpu to be at zero usage for any lengh of time.

Does anybody know what the windows 10 definition of an "idle computer" is....?


There are many other power features that i don't understand.......such as DEEP SLEEP and things offered in BIOS
Also, settings like "ALLOW AWAY MODE POLICY....." on the win desktop.

and many other power states

SUSPEND, STANDBY, SLEEP, HIBERNATE

thx

V

[Rich]

Hi cast-fish
A screen saver starts running after a predefined time of inactivity of the keyboard and mouse. Screen activity is typically irrelevant.

[GNUser]

Hi, cast-fish. Have been using  xscreensaver  for many years. I don't know if it's representative of all screensavers. What causes  xscreensaver  specifically to come into action is when, for entire user-defined timeout period, there is keyboard or mouse activity.

Some media player applications (e.g., mpv, mplayer) have a configurable "heartbeat" feature: Every few seconds the player sends a signal to the screensaver that resets the screensaver's timeout period. This prevents the screensaver from activating in the middle of a movie. See here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XScreenSaver#Disable_during_media_playback

When watching videos in a web browser, however, I've found it to be a bit more tricky to keep screensaver from kicking in. The workaround that I use is to deactivate the screensaver whenever my computer is producing sound (presumably every video has sound). To accomplish this, I have this script start at every boot (it's always running on the background because it's on an endless loop):

Code: [Select]

#!/bin/sh

while true; do
    sleep 10
    if grep -q RUNNING /proc/asound/card*/pcm*/sub*/status; then # there is sound, so give screensaver a nudge
        xscreensaver-command -deactivate
    fi
done

The topic of power management is quite complicated and I'm sure it varies tremendously among different BIOS and OS implementations.

[cast-fish]

Yes GNUser.

The power management topic is involved.  A windows 10 Laptop has in excess of 100 different use desktop settings for power.

my POWER PROFILE is a default one inside the OS..........it does not seem to work right.

The Default screen saver does not kick in after pre-defined time. I think it's because there is Motion video on the screen.

If the screen is  static and also no mouse or keys activity....then the saver kicks in

there are other power issues too............regarding deep sleep.

Thx

[cast-fish]

The power management topic is involved.  A windows 10 Laptop has in excess of 100 different user desktop settings for power.