bpi5 vs screen blankers

[gene1934]

Anything involved with screen blanking /MUST/ be removed or disabled, on the bpim5, and it exists in so many places it took me 2 days of poking around to stop the no recovery except reboot if un-used for more than 15 minutes regardless of what it happens to be running at the time.

 

When a blanker kicks in, the monitor powers down and the bpim5 goes inactive with only the red pwr led on steady, and nothing wakes it up except the reset button.

These things use so little power that it doesn't bither me a bot to leave them running. I have an rpi4b running a big metal lathe that works as intended, with uptimes in years, this should be the same.

 

It would be nice to have a blanker that actually blanked only the monitor instead of crashing the whole system.

 

Can this be fixed?

[gene1934]

Another detail, how can I determine if its booting from u-sd or emmc?

 

Thank you.

[NicoD]

@gene1934You didn't give the needed information to be able to help you well.
What image are you using? What desktop? What kernel? ...

This is indeed something Armbian  could do without. I've had simular problems with other boards. I always disable it manually.
It depends on what desktop you are using how to disable it.
For xfce4 you need to install xfce4-power-manager
And I think you need to work with screensaver to disable display and not go into sleep. With other desktops it might be different.

The second question. Many ways to check this. Simplest should be "df -H"
The once with "/" is your boot device. Or you can just check in a file manager what size it is(if eMMC and sd are not the same size)
Or use gnome-disks to see what's used.

One thing I can tell you is that when you reboot the M5 with an sd-card inserted it will always boot from eMMC. Cold boot it will boot from sd.

[gene1934]

Also, in the bug report questionaire, it requires one to sign up for google, and I don't "do" google. Their vacuum sucking up data about you never turns off. And it is not open for discussion.

 

dl is Armbian_22.08.7_Bananapim5_bullseye_edge_5.19.16_gnome_desktop.img

 

xfce4-power-manager was not installed, is installing now, as it pulls in several more packages

 

Where in what you might call a menu, is it configured? The lack of a pager to switch workspaces is "painful".

 

Thank you.

[gene1934]

I'm now installing the xfce4-desktop tasksel

minor buglet, ib sudo -E synaptic, the mouse pointer disappears when over a checkbox.

[gene1934]

ib=in

[gene1934]

To fill in the blanks, all 4 of these have this image as 1st boot:

Armbian_22.08.7_Bananapim5_bullseye_edge_5.19.16_gnome_desktop.img 1st one after instaling the xfce4-power-manger, AND somehow getting it switched to xfce4 from whatever the default of that image is, is working pretty good, it's currently running octoprint. and printing a nema-23 motor mount for an Ender5plus Y motor higher speed modification. The 3rd and 4tgh one are awaiting rebuilt machines to run.

 

The next one, same image, different local ipv4 address, refuses to give me a switchable desktop choice, despite about 100 pkgs of xfce4 stuff installed. And goes into a forever sleep when the blanker kicks in, needing a power down reset to recover.

 

Does this info help?

 

Thanks, take care and stay well everybody.

[Igor]

22 minutes ago, gene1934 said:

forever sleep when the blanker kicks in

You can try creating a file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/01-armbian-defaults.conf with this content:
 

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier		"Monitor0"
	Option			"DPMS" "false"
EndSection
Section "ServerFlags"
	Option			"BlankTime" "0"
	Option			"StandbyTime" "0"
	Option			"SuspendTime" "0"
	Option			"OffTime" "0"
EndSection

 

following by restart.

[gene1934]

Thank you Igor, I'll give this a shot. I think I've done all that with xset and failed. Might have a typu someplace.

Take are and stay well.

Cheers, Gene

[gene1934]

I jut left it running, so see if it now runs.

 

However, that did NOT turn off dpms, I still do that by hand, so either whatever reads that file is busted, or something later is re-enabling dpms.

 

IDK.

 

Thank you Igor.  Take care and stay well.

Cheers, gene.

 

[gene1934]

didn't work, crashed right on schedule. This might Just Work, IF somebody would tell me how to actually switch from this ungainly gui desktop to xfce4 & its text menu's..

[Igor]

12 hours ago, gene1934 said:

that did NOT turn off dpms

Try to replace monitor identifier with yours. You can get names with:
 

 xrandr --query

 

[gene1934]

I did that, it said twice, one composite-1 and one said HDMI-1, since its plugged into that port I made it say that "HDMI-1" but nothing is changed after the reboot, dpms is still enabled and it will crash when something else thinks it should blank an inactive screen, even if I do an xset -dpms and repeat the xset -q to show dpms is off, and all blank times show as 0.

 

So whats next?

 

All this would work iiiiiifffffff I could make it switch to xfce4 as desktop. What is the official method? Whatever the heck this "edge" is, is junk that should never have seen daylight.  just found an 11-armbian.conf in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d that says xfce but there is also a 10-file that says slick-greeter, and the slick-greeter screen now shows a xfce4-terminal, but that is the only xfce4 thing I see for installing 90% of a synaptic search for xfce4.

So the question is still:How do I switch it to using xfce4 for everything?

 

Cheers, gene

[gene1934]

Another point of interest, panfrost is spamming the syslog with errors for every keyboard keypress, or change in the mouse pointer because it move in or out of the terminal border on the screen.

/var/log/syslog is well over a gigabyte because each report is repeated 3 to 6 times in the milliscond the key was down ot the mouse pointer image is changed.. I think the next thibg I try is another board, which already has an identical image on it u-sd.  Later.

[gene1934]

on the next bpi5, I found the desktop switcher. its that absolutely meaningless jumble of pixels in the upper right corner of the lightdm login window.

Am I being overly cautious at not clicking on something that does not mean a thing o a new bee?