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It took a minute for me to get screen "blanking" working in bookworm (labwc) on a Raspberry Pi 4B. I thought it would just blank the screen, once I got it set up correctly; but it actually does a more screen saver-like thing: it rotates between black and four other colors.

I like what it's doing! However, I'd like to change the timing and the colors.

I did a lot of searching just to get the screensaver/blanking working. I've also searched on the possible config files for labwc (especially those located in ~/.config/labwc - I've discovered the ~/.config/wayfire.ini, say, does nothing involved with labwc).

I found this example autostart file on labwc's site. Based on the comments in the file and the man page for swayidle, the commands listed on lines 30 - 34 appear to turn the screen black (-c 000000) after 5 minutes (300 seconds), then power off the screen after 600 seconds (10 minutes).

My ~/.config/autostart file contains:

swayidle -w timeout 600 'wlopm --off \*' resume 'wlopm --on \*' &

The screen starts flashing colors after 10 minutes, true. But, this doesn't explain the rotating screen colors, AFAI can tell, or the speed at which the colors change.

Which file(s) control the colors and rotation speed of bookworm's labwc "screen saver"?

Update: someone suggested to me that this color-switching thing is actually a "screen test" of some sort. Again, it's cycling through black and four other colors (white, red, blue, and green, I think).

leanne
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1 Answers1

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Found a video by the display manufacturer: when the display has power, but not quite enough, it color cycles, as I'm experiencing.

So... it has nothing to do with labwc except that the wlopm --off \* command is putting the monitor into a low power state. The monitor is then responding with this test pattern.

I have found that I could write a custom "screensaver", to be called through the swayidle command, should I wish to. The default, though, is usually a simple screen blanking - if your monitor isn't sensitive about the low power mode.

leanne
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