screen blanking

I've recently made a proper user panel on my lathe. But since I'm no
longer using the keyboard or the mouse the screensaver keeps blanking
the screen, so I have to press a key on the keyboard or move the mouse
to get the screen to wake up. I could of course completely disable the
screensaver, but I would prefer not to.

The buttons I use come from the usb through hal_input. The handwheels
are connected to the motor drives.

I cannot imagine I'm the first to encounter this issue, so has anyone
already solved this?                                                            

Are you using Trixie? This might be something to take to the debian-user mailing list. I currently have that same problem with every single Debian Trixie install, except all these do not have LinuxCNC. My LinuxCNC is still on Bookworm, that did not have that problem.

I've been meaning to raise the issue on Debian-user but have not yet gotten to it.

Depending on the desktop you use, you should be able to disable the screensaver under power settings from the menu.

So the issue is the screensaver is doing what it is designed to do ?

unknown wrote:

So the issue is the screensaver is doing what it is designed to do ?

I think so

Disabled screen lock in power manager, also sleep = never. This is on Debian Trixie  with XFCE 4.20 on x11 without LinuxCNC. I don't touch the mouse and keyboard for 5 minutes and it blanks and locks. Totally locks me out if I was accessing it via vnc, it has to be locally unlocked before vnc can reconnect to the display but ssh still works. 

I don't have screensaver installed at all. I installed screensaver on a friend's Trixie machine and screensaver's sleep settings seemed to work as advertised. My previous Bookworm install didn't have screensaver either but screen lock settings worked. I read something on Debian forums about more people with similar problems. I think it was here:
forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=814969
xfce.org/about/tour

Enabled user autologin in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf so it logs me right to the desktop upon boot. That didn't seem to change anything with the screen blanking problem.

I can put up with it on the workstation for now, it would be a real problem on a cnc machine.

Even so, XFCE is my favorite desktop. It is similar to what Gnome was the first time I used Linux. Some years ago Gnome changed and completely lost my interest.

Quoting from the Xfce tour:
"Screen Locking
There is no dedicated "security" tab anymore. Lock screen management was massively simplified and "Light Locker" was dropped. "lock-on-sleep" is now synchronized with xfce4-session and xfce4-screensaver.

Screen locking settings are now only handled by xfce4-screensaver to avoid conflicts. A button to open xfce4-screensaver-preferences was added"

That gave me the idea "Power Manager" does nothing anymore. So I installed xfce4-screensaver and set the screensaver to blank and lock after one minute. I watched it for 6 minutes and it stayed lit and didn't lock.

Next I set "Power Manager" from "never" to blank and lock after 1 minute. It blanked and locked after 1 minute. I set it back to 'never'.

We'll see how it behaves over the next couple days, but it appears installing xfce4-screensaver allowed my power manager settings to work but the screensaver settings didn't work. Go figure.

I do get the idea xfce4 is experiencing a major rewrite and expect over time there will be updates that make it behave.

Edit: It appears this is the associated bug report:
bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1034607

Just to be clear, everything is working as expected. And I do know how
to disable the screensaver.

What I would like however is to tell the screensaver that I'm still
using the computer whenever I turn the handwheel. Sort of telling the
system I'm hitting an unused key on the keyboard.

I'm sure it's possible, since that is what mpv/mplayer etc. also do.
I would like to do the same from linuxcnc/gmoccapy. If no one has done
that yet, I'll have to figure it out myself.