Posted inInformation Technology

Manjaro XFCE Desktop Goes Away

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek
black screen image

Don’t you just hate it when your desktop goes away? You are toggling between the three-twelve systems you have hooked up to your dual monitor KVM and the one system you really need to use decides to turn off the desktop and displays.

I ran into this in issue with Manjaro XFCE. Really annoying. Did some digging. Found out this problem is really tied to Linux kernels 5.10 LTS and beyond. Lots of reports 5.13 still has the issue. In short, your distro will have this issue. Once the screen saver/blanking has been on for a while, it will power off the displays and nothing you can do from that powered down desktop will bring it back. If you have BOINC installed you will still see hard drive activity but you cannot bring it back to life by wiggling the mouse, hitting the shift keys or the space bar.

You Need an Asshole

Linus Torvalds – courtesy Encyclopedia Britanica

Linus has never met me. We do have a common friend, Patrick, who used to work for him. If I tell you Linus tends to be an asshole, you could read into that anything you want. As much as I hate the New Yorker due to the fact it rarely gets anything right, you can read this article about why he stepped aside. No, I’m not jealous. No, I’m not just writing this to put him down in public. When it is something like an OS kernel (or a medical device), you really need an asshole.

An elephant is a mouse designed by committee.

God forbid you ever have to use an operating system designed that way.

Did they push out hand polished turds under the tutelage of Linus every once in a while? Sure. They were almost always fixed quick. This bug first appeared in 5.10 LTS, impacts systems far and wide, and, by all accounts, is still there in 5.13. “The Committee” has no concept of a Sev-1 failure. You have to be an old-hand Linux command line user to work your way around this. Today’s point & click crowd ain’t that.

Btw.

Bug still exists in this version too

The Immediate Unscrew

The following works for XFCE users. Those with other desktops need to search the Internet for alternate values and commands. <ALT><CTRL><F4> to open a terminal. Login.

I’m using the XFCE desktop so my parameter is xfce4-session. This command will work for other desktop users, you just need to figure out what session value to use. Despite my desktop using XFCE, you will notice light locker is being used for the screen locking. Everyone who has light-locker as their screen locker for the desktop is in luck!

re-install light-locker. On Manjaro you do that with:

sudo pacman -S light-locker

restart lightdm

sudo systemctl restart lightdm

Embrace Global Warming

Yes, I turned off all of the “settings” I could from the GUI to disable powering down of the display. You still need to do that in your desktop. I’m just here to tell you that it cannot work by itself. If the powers that be want Joe and Jane citizen to “do their part” combating global warming, they need to put an asshole back in charge of the Linux kernel. 

No! You are not a coding God! He told you the code you submitted was the worst he's ever seen because it is looking up at shit hoping to one day be that good! Reach down and find a pair!

If your skin is so thin it can’t brush that off like someone you don’t know telling you “Good morning” as you pass, you shouldn’t be coding.

After your desktop restarts, open a GUI terminal and do the following:

Notice the DPMS settings at the bottom. This is what screwed you. When the kernel has this egregious of a bug, nothing you can do from the GUI settings screens can save you. The command line can save you.

Yes, you have to turn off the power management.

Oh don’t worry. This will only sink one or two inhabited islands. Your use of Bitcoin or any other crypto currency is the global warming equivalent of driving 8 SUVs that get 6 MPG 24 hours per day, seven days per week, for years on end. Your one and only Bitcoin is causing coal fired power plants to be brought back on-line. Crypto currency is an ecological disaster.

So, look at it this way. You’re just keeping your monitor powered up. That crypto currency you are using requires tens of thousands, potentially millions, of server class computers in industrial cooled buildings to mine another coin. Then they all have to stay running to maintain the blockchain “trust.”

I don’t care how much you think you are doing with an EV, it can’t make up for that.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.