power management does not consistently power down inactive monitor

This condition is happening after boot-up / login. The power manager is set to turn the monitor off after 5 minutes, but it does not do so on the initial inactive period. I am still trying to get a repeatable sequence, but it look like if I allow the screen saver to blank the screen (set to 3 minutes) initially after boot and login, the monitor is not turned off. If I then open the power manager app (System - Preferences - Power Management) and change the 5 minutes monitor off delat to 10 minutes, then close the app, then open it again and set it back to 5 minutes and close it again, after the inactive time the monitor is turned off...

OK -- so I spent some time with this machine tonight... It seems that the real problem is just the first screen-saver / idle time. So - here is a repeatable sequence:

1) After a clean shutdown, power on the machine and let Ubuntu boot;
2) Login as a user;
3) leave the display idle (my machine is set, as noted above, screen saver 3 minutes, power off monitor after 5 minutes)
    The screen saver will blank the screen, but the power manager will not turn off the monitor
4) move the mouse and the screen activity brings the display back
5) leave the display idle and both the screen saver and the power manager work as they should...

Tom

Same problem here. The power manager is inconsistent. I have the screen-saver turned off and 'Put display to sleep when inactive' set to 5 minutes. Occasionally the power manager does not kick in and the display remains on.

I've also seen this both on karmic and on lucid. I've no easy way to reproduce it, nor a way to fix it (other than log out, log back in or reboot).

One thing I noticed yesterday, was that 'xset dpms force off' would turn off the monitors (both LCD of laptop and external monitor) but then after a few seconds they'd be turned back on.

I'm seeing this problem in Lucid and I've been experiencing since I updated to Karmic.
I thought that it might be something that went wrong in the update process. But now, I made a clean install of Lucid, and the problem remains.

Sometimes it works well, but most of the times it doesn't. However, it is hard to know how to reproduce the problem.

Maybe it is related with change from HAL.

xfce4-power-manager uses HAL (as it used gnome-power-manager before Karmic) and it works properly.
This is a really annoying issue.

Thank you

For me, one source of this problem is qemu/kvm. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=578672 suggests setting SDL_VIDEO_ALLOW_SCREENSAVER=1 .

Um - I don't know that I know how to set "SDL_VIDEO_ALLOW_SCREENSAVER=1" - can you explain?

Thanks,
Tom

P.S. I have upgraded to 10.04 and have seen something like this only once...

Some applications disable the screensaver (and power management) when they're running. qemu is one such application.
The times I've seen this were when I was running qemu.

you can stop qemu (and actually, all SDL applications) from disabling the screensaver by putting SDL_VIDEO_ALLOW_SCREENSAVER=1 in your environment.

One place to do something like this is in ~/.bash_profile with:
export SDL_VIDEO_ALLOW_SCREENSAVER=1

This may not be your problem.

I don't use qemu/kvm, and unfortunately still have the same problems as in post #3. Any progress on it?