Screen goes black with inactivity after Z17 upgrade

General Help
1

Hello all. I've just recently upgraded from Zorin 16 Pro to Zorin 17 Pro. Install was uneventful. Unfortunately, the upgrade seems to correlate with an annoying issue where the screen turns black after about 30 seconds of inactivity.

The issue occurs under the following circumstances:

  1. Inactivity for about 30s.
  2. Doing only mouse movements (no clicking, no interaction)
  3. It does not occur when a full screen video is playing.

I've disabled all power related settings (screen dimming, screen timeout, adaptive brightness, etc.). I can't think of anything else to adjust or other logs to view to help troubleshoot.

Any help is appreciated as it's extremely annoying.

Thanks in advance.. KL

2

Maybe this Thread can help You: Screen Turning Off after 30 Seconds inactive

3

This implies that screen inactivity is not the issue or cause.
If the settings are set to for example to five minutes (or disabled entirely) and the screen blanks after 30 seconds, the inactivity event is further undermined.

You might check if you have any screensaver application installed - and remove it. A conflicting configuration can cause errant display behavior.

Check your graphics drivers:

sudo lshw -C video

uname -r

4

Thanks for the reply. I don't have any screensaver apps installed, just the built in screen blanking. All these are turned off or set to Never.

Do you know of any logs that I could tail to see what's causing it? Not sure if there's a log or somethng I could strace or put in verbose mode.

I did find earlier threads for Zorin 15 but no joy with any of those suggestions.

5

If there is a option to enable Presentation mode in Zorin core, switch it on and you will not get black screens anymore.

I don't use Zorin core so don't know if this option available by default or not. A quick google search of gnome presentation mode gave me this gnome extension. You may need to try this as well.

6

THank you. I tried to install but it appears to be incompatible with my version.

I am running Zorin Pro. Is there a setting for Presentation Mode? I could not find such an entry in the Settings app.

7

You could try Caffeine (but some have had problems with that on Z17) or Expresso. See this: Zorin 17 and Caffeine - #9 by Omnimaxus

8

Thank you and apologies for delay in reply.

I ended up re-installing to a new drive but the issue persisted. After that I put Linux Mint over the new drive. I like Zorin so will revisit using Caffeine as a workaround.

Some additional data points:

  • Any video playing will prevent the screen from blanking, full screen or not.
  • There are certain mouse events which do not reset the timer. I noticed this because I was moving the mouse around and it still blanked.
  • Blanking kicked in after 30s on the dot.

I'm closing this thread for now and will open a new one and reference this once I have time to re-install the old drive. Thanks for the info!