Opensuse 13.1 fresh install on a Mac Pro (mid 2009) with 24 inch Apple Cinema Display. nouveau driver. Running KDE.
I can’t get the screen to blank after the powersave interval. This used to work on the same hardware under 12.3, also using nouveau, so it’s not a hardware incapability. Of course, I can use a blank screensaver, but that doesn’t turn off the monitor backlight like true blanking does, it just displays a black screen at full power.
xset q says that dpms is enabled but xset dpms force off does nothing. If I xset dpms 1 1 1, ssh from a different machine, set DISPLAY, and check xset q, it will tell me that the monitor is OFF; but no, it’s on. I can do whatever I want with the Screen Energy Saving setting under Power Management in “configure desktop”, and it ignores me. I’ve even waited overnight, the screen stays lit indefinitely.
Other than that, everything seems to work fine with the nouveau driver. (Oddly enough, the driver ONLY works if I compile it as a module; if I compile it built-in, it won’t boot, spraying endless PAGE_NOT_PRESENT messages from the driver. Whatever.)
I’ve tried this with the standard 13.1 desktop kernel (3.11.10-7), and a 3.14.1 kernel, and both act identically.
Any ideas? I have no real interest in going to the nvidia driver, and I’d rather not try it because my experience with installing / deinstalling it has not been positive in the past. If there’s no known fix, is there a way to manually tell the driver to turn off the display so that I could roll my own powersave? (I tried the old vbetool that’s no longer in the distribution; it sort-of worked, powering down the display, but when powering back up all sorts of glitches were present, such as a missing hardware cursor.)
(The main reason I care about this is that the display is quite expensive, runs warm after a few hours, and there’s no on/off switch. As it stands now it would be running at full power 24x7 and I’d rather avoid the heat and energy wastage!)