As you probably figured out using the Gnome configuration file and attempting for them to work on MATE, don't actually do anything. However, I am going to give you a heads
up on how to access the control panel of mate, to take out that annoying screensaver / blanking problem. It would be worth it for you to create a "Desktop Launcher" of this command line tool as well. If you need to know how to do that in Linux Mint 12 / Lisa, leave a message here.

To get into the MATE configuration:

1. Open Terminal.

2. Type in the following:

sudo mate-control-center

3. Once the control center is opened, go to the screensaver icon and open that section of the control center.

4. If it gives you a warning in regards to the XScreenSaver daemon doesn't seem to running right now, hit "Cancel".

5. Go to the Mode drop down box, select Disable Screen Saver.

6. Go to File on the menu bar and go to "Quit" or hit the window close button (the X) on this window, does the same thing.

After this, you should be good to go. I hope this helps all of you!

Another thing I should also point out, if that doesn't work in the MATE control center, you can always try the following.

1. Open Terminal

2. Type in the following:

sudo gnome-control-center

3. Once the control center for Gnome is opened, go to the "Screen" icon and double click on it.

4. Select the Turn off after: Never

5. Select if you want to lock your screen or not during an extended away from keyboard (EAFK) time period.

6. Hit the close button (the X) in the upper right hand corner of that window or go back to the Gnome-Control-Center to do more work.

That should do it as well.

Hi there,

I haven't been around here for a few weeks, but now came back to have a look.

Yes, and meanwhile, that seems logical to me. It's like you edit the Apache configuration and expect that to have an effect on Samba.

You're kidding, are you? If I had any screensaver section in Control Center, I wouldn't have had a reason to start this thread. But there's NOTHING like that. Nothing that sounds remotely like screensaver or power management.

That's a tricky idea, starting the GNOME settings applet in MATE - however, I can't verify any longer if it works, because in the meantime I found a solution myself. I added an item in Startup Applications and gave it the command:

/usr/bin/gnome-screensaver --no-daemon

I stumbled on that solution because one afternoon I noticed that the screen stayed on! I liked that, but didn't know why it did. Investigating what was different, I found exactly the command mentioned above in the output of ps (It might have been Brasero issuing the anti-screensaver command).
So to verify the effect, I rebooted the system, waited a few minutes - okay, the screens went blank. Then I issued the same command in a terminal, waited another while, and the screens stayed on. Yippee!
A day or two later, I repeated that procedure on my notebook, and it worked there, too.

Problem solved. :-)

[X] Doc CPU

There is something inherently wrong with the way Linux Mint 12 operates, it's like certain parts of the GUI configuration were thrown together without much thought on the inter-operation of the different desktop environments. Your command line fix also works, although, I was pointing this response for people that may or may not have the experience in Linux like we do. They at one point might want to re-enable some of the features (screensavers) they did before. I've noticed a lot of the newcomers try to avoid the bash shell as much as possible, I'm just trying to help them along, to show them it's not "that" scary.

It's funny though, I started with Linux way back in the old days, right after Linus had released the OS to the public and people started getting interested in it. I found by using the various shells; bash, C and all the others, it's was pretty liberating instead of being stuck with the clunky MS-DOS (which was a clone of CP/M but written for the x86 CPUs instead of the Intel 8080, Zilog 80 series and Intel 8085).

To get back onto the subject, I am glad you found a more elegant command line parameter to get what you wanted. I'm actually looking forward to seeing Linux Mint 13, because that's going to be the next Long Term Support (LTS) release and I believe everything in that will (should) be easier to use and make sense.

Hi there,

that's nicely expressed, and I guess it is particularly true for the MATE desktop, which is a GNOME2 derivative - and all its components had to be renamed so as not to conflict with the real GNOME desktop. I'm pretty sure the developers did more than just rename components, and looking at the very short time of MATE's evolution, bugs and accidents are likely.

Yet I stated in my first post in this thread that MATE has no GUI access whatsoever to screensaver and/or power management settings; that's why i didn't know what to think of your suggestion.

I see your point, though I rather have the opposite attitude: Why use an inconvenient GUI approach, when I can have a simple command line solution? ;-)
Besides, I've never understood the hype about screensavers. When I leave my computer for some time, I switch the monitor off or even put the computer in standby mode. Switching the monitor into standby mode using DPMS is fine, because then it can be controlled from the computer itself. But an automatism that turns the monitor off by simply counting idle time is a nuisance, because it always kicks in at the most inappropriate moment.

Actually, it wasn't a clone of CP/M, it was a new product. But much like Windows has had a long history of being backwards compatible to DOS, DOS itself was designed to be backwards compatible to CP/M.

I hope you're right, and I'm keen on Maya, too. I'm gonna try it on my notebook first, because Lisa has some more issues about power management. For instance, when I disconnect my notebook from mains, Lisa shuts down the system immediately, because the interaction between MATE and the power daemon produces a bogus information about the battery level: It always reports an empty battery.

[X] Doc CPU

I've seen that too on a client's computer, come to think of it Ubuntu does it too from which the source of Linux 12 is derived from. Can't seem to remember how I fixed it either (that's going to bother me now until I remember). I seem to remember that despite no matter what you put in the GUI driven menus and it said it updated the correct conf files, it still didn't do it. It's like a GUI bug, it's one of those things you have to go at it from console and bash shell command line.

There is another bug that on certain laptops that have PAE kernels that when you plug the power into the mains (from the wall to the switching power supply to the computer) it will reboot your computer without shutting it down correctly. That's bad because your have a corrupt session you have to repair from a previous time.

As beautiful as the GUI looks in Linux Mint 12 the underlying Linux, the 3.x series kernel drives me up the wall. I think they really need to work on making them a hell of a lot more stable rather than trying to tweak every last thing in it. Heck, most people don't need those tweaks, just go with a BFS scheduler and kernel, similar to what PCLinuxOS does with their brand of Linux. The BFS scheduling and kernel is perfect for power users and people that aren't intending on running a server, as the BFS is tuned for foreground applications and daemons rather than background applications and daemons.

It's one of those thing, that in Linux distributions, you always get a rotten tomato in there somewhere, where is the question and whether or not you can deal with it or toss it out (is this tomato optional, because I want to throw it out). Some of the more stable Linux distros are either a pain in the ass to setup for newbies or they're expensive. Referring to Slackware, for that company I have a lot of respect for but if you need help when setting it up in the installation process, that's a tough one, depends on your configuration, most of the applications if you go with the recommended install goes pretty smoothly once you get past the partitioning and formatting options.
On the other hand the fairly spartan Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL for short) costs money but in a lot of cases for mission critical businesses that is the way to go for the sake of stability.

I was looking at releasing my brand of Linux, rather a distro but I just don't know at this point of time to do a public release. It's one of those things where I want to make sure that a pro all the way down to a newbie can handle it, I just don't want to make the same mistakes as 1,000+ other Linux distros before me did. Yes, there are that many forked off the main distros (main surviving distros; Slackware, Mandrake, RedHat, Debian and Mandriva).

There is another version of Linux I like but it's really spartan but they have a good idea on how Linux should work. Look up Tiny Core Linux, they have X-Windows drivers and no fancy GUI but they make up for it in terms of speed. The favorite is the Core Plus installation / live CD. It's fast!

Hi there,

you're talking about the unexpected shutdown on disconnecting mains power? - Keep thinking please. I'd be very interested in a solution, or at least a workaround, if only for the remaining time until Mint 13 is out, which will hopefully have that issue fixed.

Again: I think your memory is playing tricks on you, because Mint 12 has no GUI controls for power management matters. At least not with the MATE desktop, and that's the only one that has this particular problem.

That's what I would think. And I'm not backing off editing config files manually. ;-)

Urgh. Very nasty indeed. I had a similar issue while I was still using Ubuntu 10.04: When I shut down the system, I could see some serious error message in the last split second before power-down, but it was to quick to read the message. It often left the file system in an incoherent state, luckily it could always be fixed during the next startup. And to make it a bit more difficult to track that bug, the syslog service was terminated before that error occurred, so there was never a log entry that could've given a hint.
Yea, it was always the LTS versions of Ubuntu that caused me trouble (8.04 never even worked on the computer I had chosen for it, 10.04 had some more issues beside the one mentioned, and 10.10 was the latest real Ubuntu version I used), while I had no problems with the non-LTS versions.

I know, I recommended Tiny Core (or Micro Core) myself here and there. It's a chance to get a true Linux on small embedded PCs with as little as 32MB RAM. My next project might be the "4MB Linux", a handmade combination of a 2.6 kernel, a busybox, and probably syslinux as a bootloader. Alright, maybe it'll require 8MB RAM instead of only four. :-)

[X] Doc CPU

Have you looked at xset?
You might try something like "xset -dpms"
You can also set sleep and suspend values with xset.

What I do when I do a default installation is go looking for more stable packages of everything that I can find and in this case MATE desktop environment was no exception.

The default install with Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) comes with MATE v1.00 but the version I had installed over it is v1.2x and that had the power and screensaver options, had I stuck with the old one that was default install, those two wouldn't show up in MATE.

I would like to apologize for not saying that earlier, I would have thought everyone else would have done the same thing but apparently not.

http://www.fsckinglinux.com/

Read that blog post and how to set it up via the terminal command line. So, yes, I do see the options and I booted with a LiveDVD with the stock v1.0 MATE and sure enough I couldn't see the options anymore.

They need an animated smiley of bashing one's head against a wall or better yet the computer or monitor.

Hi there,

I do that, too - but then I think there must be a reason for newer versions of some packages not being included in a distro's repositories. Maybe they're not fully tested for compatibility, as seemed the case with Mint 12 and MATE 1.2 at the time I did my research a few weeks ago. I don't remember where I read it, but there it said that Mint had the latest stable version included, and more recent releases were to use at one's own risk.
If I set aside a PC (or maybe a virtual machine) and have a lot of time for testing, okay, then I'm also ready to test new bleeding edge software. But on a PC I need for everyday work, I'd rather have a stable and reliable system.

Okay, that explains a lot. No need to apologize, though - happens to me all the time: There's something I consider obvious, and without thinking about it I assume everybody else does, too.

The question now is: Is it worth the effort (and the inherent risk) to install MATE 1.2 standalone, or should I wait for Mint 13, which is supposed to have MATE 1.2 integrated. I read somewhere that Mint 13 release is expected in May 2012, that would be soon ... ;-)

Hmm. To do or not to do ... .oO(?)

[X] Doc CPU

Here is the thing, Ubuntu is going through the trials of their Release Candidates (RCs) and open betas as of right now for 12.04 for the LTS, so when they are done and that is released as the LTS, Mint Linux will then use that base source to compiler, debug and link up to their project Linux Mint 13, which will have a lot of bugs that Ubuntu didn't have because of the new / different interface, coupled with the additional menus, desktop environments, etc., that could raise hell. Even though it's an LTS, being in beta, we don't know if features are going to be in there in the release so it's best to wait until everything is solidified before you jump. There is nothing worse than a system that looks great, works great (in theory) but is full of bugs. Unless you are actively developing and/or debugging the next release don't install it, or you can install it on a test machine (not another set of partitions on the same machine, seen some bad things occur in beta OSes whacking the good working ones).

Besides, you were looking for a fix to the power and screensaver problem anyways in this thread (sorry for side tracking a bit).

Another thing that drives me up the wall with the Debian series distros, especially Ubuntu and Linux Mint is the use of Python scripts used almost everywhere. I can understand using it for say, beta software but as a system matures and you release a stabilized LTS, they should take the .py scripts and convert them in C/C++ and compile them to gain speed on the host computer, not to mention make the programs / applications faster and smaller in size (in memory and on the disks).

What should have been done by now, because of the exclusive locking issues associated with all of these scripts is they should be all combined. Update Manager, Synaptic Package Manager, Software Center, all should be combined in one file. Also, there should be a terminal window option docked on the inside of this application, so that you can use the terminal to update, etc. or use it as a monitor watching the script or updating process interactively. It's just stupid stuff like this that makes me wonder why they keep them separate. Sure I get the security of it but at the same time, the way in which each of these are written, especially in Python script is inherently insecure in the first place.

I'm having the same issue as the OP. I've read through the posts but cannot see a solution. Since it's been some time and we are on Mint 21.3 Mate, has anyone found a solution? It's unfathomable that after like 3 iterations I am having the same nutty and mind-numbing inconvenience. I moved to Mint from Win 10 after reading countless praises how Linux is so superior to Windows, but I don't get it. Every day I'm dealing with things that ought to work because it's a time-honored practice but such features are either omitted or are buggy. So far Linux is just not ready for mainstreaming, if I have to spend a bulk of the day figuring out the problem and solution. And what's with the damn terminal codes every time there's an issue? OMG!!!

Please is there anyone out there who has figured this stupid issue of the display going to sleep constantly?

Thanks in advance and excuse my rant... but it's not unwarranted.