screen blanking

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.
 

Maybe have a look at this:
askubuntu.com/questions/524384/how-can-i...epending-on-activity

There is some good information in there, thanks.

I've added the following line to hal_input, and it get's me 90% of what I want.

diff --git a/src/hal/user_comps/hal_input.py b/src/hal/user_comps/hal_input.py
index 87c90e716d..3e0a720384 100644
--- a/src/hal/user_comps/hal_input.py
+++ b/src/hal/user_comps/hal_input.py
@@ -165,6 +165,7 @@ class HalInputDevice:
print("Unexpected event", ev.type, ev.code, file=sys.stderr)
continue
if ev.type == 'EV_KEY':
+ subprocess.call(["xdotool", "key", "Control_L"])
if ev.value:
self.set(code, 1)
self.set(code + "-not", 0)