can't prevent screen from turning off in oneiric

Thank you for your bug report, that's a GNOME decision though it seems one which is worth distro patch out to add a "never" to the option, assigning to the canonical desktop team for opinions

upstream discussion on https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647828

Personally I think that "never" is a justifyable option, not just as a workaround for broken video players (as upstream alluded to). I just don't like that we'd have to keep the patch forever, but I guess it's not very intrusive. So +1 from me.

Rodrigo do you know if it would be trivial to add back a "never" there?

I have to add my frustration with the lack of this option. We have a number of PCs displaying network status information on large screens. Without this option we’re unable to use (or test) 11.10 on these machines as the screens will blank.

We were hoping to standardise on Ubuntu across all desktops after the release of 11.10, however the lack of such basic features is not only a barrier to testing it’s a major concern if not expected at release.

I mentioned this here: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+question/169946 expecting that I’d missed something obvious or that this was just a simple option that would be added nearer release. Reading this thread (and worse what the folks at Gnome have written) gives the impression things are going backwards rather than forwards. I hope I’m misinterpreting?

It also makes no sense having the screen go blank in a virtual machine.

And yes, I find the attitude of the gnome devs astonishing as well. There are a stack of features that used to be in gnome2 but are missing from gnome3, and their response is always, "It's that way by design so we won't even consider fixing it". The trouble is that their design only considers a small range of workflows. Thank god for Unity, which fixes the biggest limitations of gnome3. (If not, we'd have to follow Linus' lead and move to Xfce or something: http://digitizor.com/2011/08/04/linus-torvalds-ditches-gnome-for-xfce/)

There is now an option 'Never' thanks to a recent patch, but then the screen begins to turn off immediately.

See bug : https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-control-center/+bug/864270

Another bug in this "turn off delay" : both 30 minutes and 1 hour delays are actually just 10 minutes. That was actually the case before the addition of the 'Never' (which still doesn't work right now).

I stumbled upon this issue when attempting to work around the suspend bug (system always suspends even when told not to). So, +1 from me. Also, noticed that when the setting in question is set to "Never" it also makes text input nearly impossible due to the screen continually going dark.

Lokard, the 10 minute turning off is the dpms setting which does not get overriden by anything for some reason - see "xset q" output.

+1 If you set lockscreen to never, it means "now". that can't stay like this.

the option got added back in Oneiric