I was goofing around and changed the setting in lilo for my screen (vga=787) and found I rather liked the tighter look and larger viewing area it afforded me. However, in the past I have used the DPMS functions of the monitor to put it to sleep after fifteen minutes or so, and it is apparent that this won't work now. This has led me to wonder if there is an obvious way to work around this and have it sleep as it did in the normal setting? I hate to shut down and reboot, but I have this thing about seeing that glowing grey screen that it has after awhile. If there is no way to continue doing it as I did in the past, could I just turn the monitor off and back on later or will this hurt something? Thanks for any help.

Turning your monitor on and off is no big deal. The switch or power unit could go out from turning on and off but it shouldnt be a problem. Are you talking about the monitor being turned on and off with the GUI or just the console? If console, you just need to change the settings (generally) in the BIOS.

Both x and text mode are affected. In the past I used "setterm -blank 10 setterm -powersave on" I think. This would cause my monitor to go into a standby mode and the power light would blink and so on. There was a pause as it would come back up if I pressed a key. Now it just blanks and never goes any further. The power light is steady and there is no delay in coming up at all. And actually the screen never goes off but just blanks.

In x I used "xset dpms..." and that worked fine. In fluxbox I added "xset dpms force off" so that I could just click that and put the monitor to sleep. That also does not work when I use the framebuffer mode for x, which I switched too out of necessity for having bought an el cheapo monitor which simply would not seem to work in any other way.

If shutting it down manually is no problem then at least I can do that overnight, which is certainly the most important. I do wish I could figure out a workaround for the framebuffer with setterm and xset dpms both failing. That was a convenient method which I rather liked.

BTW, which settings in BIOS would I normally need to look at?

Just monitor or hardware sleep modes (if it's supported -- gotta throw that caveat in )