Linux disable screen blanking i.e. preventing screen going blank
It is easy to disable screen saver under X window. But when it comes to text based login or terminal you will not find easy way to disable text based power saving mode (i.e. when your screen goes blank after a few minutes).
So how do I disable the blank screen mode, which activated after a few minutes? Answer is use setterm command.
setterm writes to standard output a character string that will invoke the specified terminal capabilities. Where possible terminfo database (terminfo is a data base describing terminals, used by screen-oriented programs and libraries such as ncurses) is consulted to find the string to use.
By default, the Linux kernel will use screen-save option to disable it you need to type command (it turns off monitor VESA powersaving features):
$ setterm -powersave off -blank 0
If it dumps back you with an error that read as follows:
cannot (un)set powersave mode
You need to shutdown X window system and rerun the above command. Better, add following two commands to your ~/.xinitrc file:
setterm -blank 0 -powersave off -powerdown 0
xset s off
Other useful options
This command also supports other useful options:
Resets the terminal to its power on state:
$ setterm -reset
Alternatively, initialize terminal:
$ setterm -initialize
Turns the terminal's cursor on or off:
$ setterm -cursor [on|off]
Turns automatic line-wrapping on or off (virtual consoles only)
$ setterm -linewrap [on|off]
Sets the foreground text color (virtual consoles only):
$ setterm -foreground blue
Sets the background text color (virtual consoles only):
$ setterm -background red
Enables or disables the sending of kernel printk() messages to the console (virtual consoles only). Useful if you get lots message from iptables firewall:
$ setterm -msg [on|off]
I regularly use these (above) options.
See also:
- Please consult the setterm and terminfo man pages for more information.
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I wouldn’t use “setterm -msg off”, as you don’t get useful panic messages. Rather use “dmesg -n1″, so that you still get panic messages but not all the trivial junk to the console. Otherwise thank you for a useful page
Your guide was a great help, however it wasn’t enough for a clean approach on my Ubuntu 7.10 system.
I don’t have an .xinitrc, so instead I put this in ~/.bashrc:
xset s off > /dev/null 2>&1and this in /etc/rc.local
sh -c 'setterm -blank 0 -powersave off -powerdown 0 /dev/console 2>&1'This also does not produce errors even though I’m running an X session.
Somehow copy-paste screwed up before.
Here’s the code for rc.local:
sh -c 'setterm -blank 0 -powersave off -powerdown 0 /dev/console 2>&1'I’m very sorry to “spam” like this >_<
Figured < was interpreted as an HTML-tag.
Hopefully it should work now:
sh -c 'setterm -blank 0 -powersave off -powerdown 0 < /dev/console > /dev/console 2>&1'Great tips. Screen blanking used to irritate me on the console, too. Especially for my servers which I KVM into. There’s no screen to burn out, so why should the term go blank?
Anyway, I wanted to add that sometimes I’ll do something dumb, like cat’ing a binary file, and it completely screws the terminal window. The way to recover from that is just the ‘reset’ command. A lot of people probably don’t know that.
Before I learned about it, sometimes I’d be up to 3 or 4 terminals lost to garbage on the screen. Logging out never helped, and I used to have to restart the machine to recover them. ‘reset’ fixed that.
also you can just execute
echo -e ‘33[9;0]33[14;0]‘
if your terminal supports CSI-sequences (if you use linux - you may shure that it does)
omg, ‘\33[9;0]\33[14;0]‘ i mean