Re: Screensaver issues after distro upgrade (SOLVED)

[Christopher David Howie]

On 9/11/2019 7:01 PM, Miroslav Skoric wrote:
> Well, I noticed that issue after I recently upgraded to Stretch, but not
> had it in Jessie. Whatever. Having in mind that Stretch is oldstable for
> a while, and you had the issue in Buster, it seems that the issue goes
> through the versions intact :-)

Yes, light-locker has not changed much recently and the threads I was
able to find on the issue spanned many years and Linux distributions.
Debian is not unique to have this problem.

I believe this is the relevant bug.  It may be useful to add any
additional information beyond what has already been reported there:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=913062

Perhaps the problem is hardware-specific.  It doesn't seem like everyone
has this problem, so there must be something our systems all have in
common to trigger this.

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Re: Screensaver issues after distro upgrade (SOLVED)

[Miroslav Skoric]

On 9/10/19 8:11 PM, Christopher David Howie wrote:


On 9/10/19 4:30 AM, Miroslav Skoric wrote:

After upgrading the old laptop from Jessie to Stretch, I noticed that
the screensaver in Mate environment does not work for me as before. For
example, when the screen goes black after some time of inactivity, for
returning back it is not enough just to touch the touchpad or press any
key. Instead, pressing any key or touching the touchpad makes the screen
just some 1% lighter than the full black (or better to say, it remains
99% black). However, the last working GUI does not return.


I have this same issue with the default configuration of XFCE on Buster,
where the problem was not present on Stretch.



Hi Chris,

Well, I noticed that issue after I recently upgraded to Stretch, but not 
had it in Jessie. Whatever. Having in mind that Stretch is oldstable for 
a while, and you had the issue in Buster, it seems that the issue goes 
through the versions intact :-)



Is light-locker installed, and do you use lightdm?  light-locker appears
to be the source of this issue.  Googling "light-locker black screen"
returns dozens of posts across many sites complaining about the same
problem.



Yes, light-locker was installed, and as soon as I removed it the problem 
disappeared. By the way, lightdm is still there, however I am unsure 
about the display manager in current use because it is the system that 
started initially from Squeeze several years ago, and included Gnome, 
KDE, LXDE, and XFCE (and I added MATE in Wheezy I think). Before the 
last dist-upgrade I removed KDE because I used it at least.



I resolved this issue by removing light-locker and installing
xscreensaver instead.  Note that this required removing a few
metapackages, and then marking the dependent packages that I wanted to
keep as manually installed to prevent apt from removing most of my
desktop tools.



Well, in trying solution for this issue, I removed xscreensaver 
yesterday. So it disappeared from MATE's menu System > Preferences > ... 
but that did not solve the problem.


Nevertheless now I only have one instance of screensaver preferences in 
MATE's System > Preferences > Look and Feel > Screensaver. It works well 
for now. I'll observe its behaviour, and report again if it is not good.


Thank you for help!

Misko