centos 7: control idle (screen blanking) time?

Question

OS: CENTOS 7 / Gnome 3 GUI

How do I the time that must elapse until the OS thinks that the computer is idle and blanks out the screen?

I am aware of the new Settings | Privacy | Screen Lock feature, however this feature simply prevents the screen from locking, when the screen black. I turned this feature off.

I am also aware of the setterms --powersave off command line feature. This feature prevents blanking the screen and going into power save mode.

I want to control the time. The default is about a minute or so.

With CENTOS 6.5, there was a screensaver applet that controlled the time and behavior. I am aware that GNOME 3 thought nobody in their right mind would want a screensaver, so they got rid of it. The applet, gnome-screensaver, is not possible to install, but as I read does not solve the problem.

Thoughts?

Solution 1

You can control the delay time with a setting under "Power" option within Settings area.

Solution 2

GUI way:

1. In the upper right corner "USERNAME" menu select "Settings"
2. Go to "Power"
3. "Power Saving->Blank Screen" = can be set from 1 - 15 minutes

Command line way (to view and set it to 5 minutes):

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay 300

Solution 3

OS: CentOS Linux 7 Gnome: Version 3.14.2 Virtualization: KVM

I was having the same issues. This is the path I took to resolve the timer issue.

Settings / Privacy / Screen Lock (Click on the Screen Lock tab... the whole thing is the tab :-) ) Select the new timer or turn it off. Problem solved!

KoalaJoe

Solution 4

Just in case we have any minimal centos users here. Where there is not a GUI. Use the command setterm (command for adjusting various time based settings) -blank (screen blank out from inactivity) 30 (the new length of time you wish the event out to occur). In this case, 30 minutes.

setterm -blank 30

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Comments

[codefan-BK]

as an additional answer: Under the "Power" option within Settings area you can control the delay time in steps of: 1 min / 2 min / 3 min / 4 min / 5 min / 8 min / 10 min / 12 min / 15 min / never So found with CentOS 7 and GNOME Version 3.8.4

[Sarah Weinberger]

Sadly, the selection here is 15-minutes or never. The GNOME team needs to put back a user definable field.

[WesternGun]

This should be the accepted answer. Thanks!!

[James Antill]

Note that any number of seconds works Eg. "gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay 3600" to set it to an hour.

[Vadim Kotov]

@SarahWeinberger See Jim's answer for CLI way to set this