On 4 Jan, Kenneth Crudup wrote: > On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Kevin Brosius wrote: > >> Does 'xset dpms force off' turn off the backlight on that machine? > > First thing I tried. >
I've lost track of which chip you are dealing with. For the R128 chip I found that the DPMS only shuts down video output. It does not activate any of the other power saving modes. This is for a good reason (at least as default). Undesirable interactions were reported with the APM support when the X DPMS code used these other commands. In my case I do not want APM or ACPI to activate. I am cutting power in a server environment, and the APM/ACPI is aimed more at single user systems like laptops. Also, the Linux APM/ACPI support remains flakey. So I modified the R128 DPMS code to not only cut the video output, but also to activate the shutdown for other parts of the controller. I can post the diffs if this helps. This does raise a question for X users in general. Should there be an option to enable a more aggressive power management when DPMS is used? This would probably interfere with APM/ACPI, so the option would need appropriate warnings. But it would help the multi-user systems that need a more selective power management control. I my situation, power management consists of killing sound and display after idle, and controlling idle spindown time on selected disk drives. Some disks must remain spinning to meet response goals. Others can be spun down. The CPU must always remain ready for immediate response. R Horn _______________________________________________ Xpert mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert
