# How to prevent monitor from being automatically turned off?

## xiaweitang

Thinkpad R60e. The monitor (or backlight) turns off after about 10 minutes of idle, and when it's waked up, the brightness level is lower than normal. This must be a power saving feature, but I want to change the values or disable it. This happens even X is not running.

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## NathanZachary

What desktop environment?  If I remember correctly from other posts, you are using KDE.  If that is the case, then you should be able to set these options in the "Power Control" section of the "System Settings."

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## xiaweitang

I haven't installed any DE, but only X. The power saving feature is on even before starting X.

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## NathanZachary

If you are planning on using a desktop environment, then the tool for that respective DE will be the easiest.  You can also configure X to not worry about the screen as well, but I'm not sure what I could recommend for pre-X configuration regarding screen brightness.  All of my computers do that as well before I am in X.  I'm sure there is a way to do it without X running, I'm just not sure how.

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## NathanZachary

I found the following information, but I have not tested it.  If you'd like to test it, here it is.

1.  You can set the powersave options for your monitor before X is started by using the setterm command.

```

setterm -powersave off -blank 0

```

2.  You can then have that command run at boot by adding it to your rc.local.

3.  However, Gentoo does not use a typical rc.local file.  Rather, ours is located at /etc/conf.d/local.start.

4.  You would therefore add this line to the end of your local.start:

```

/usr/bin/setterm -powersave off -blank 0

```

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## xiaweitang

That solves the problem before starting X, but not after staring X. It could be backlight turned off, or blank screen saver turn on. But I don't know how to find it out.

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## theotherjoe

xiaweitang,

there are two possible ways to solve it.

1. to turn off xserver power management while Xserver is running:

```

# xset -dpms

```

or

2. turn power management during xserver startup via xorg.conf

```
Section "Monitor"

        Identifier   "Monitor0"

        ...

        Option      "DPMS" "off"

EndSection

```

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