Turning off screen saving (one more time)...

I've been wrangling with the screensaver and DPMS on my Mythbuntu box (see here and here).

At this point I've got DPMS off but still have one nagging issue - some screensaver is kicking on and I have to press a button on the remote to get it to turn off. Better than having to hit a key on the keyboard, but still not what I want - I just want to turn on the monitor and see my MythTV dammit.

First, I figured out that I could disable DPMS with the ~/.xsessionrc file, e.g:

$ cat ~/.xsessionrc
xset s noblank
xset s off
xset -dpms

Now, that should turn off the X screensaver too, but seems like something is still running. Ah, poking around I find I have gnome-screensaver running:

$ ps auxwww | grep gnome-screensaver
user 6086 0.0 0.1 15420 4908 ? Ss Oct19 0:32 gnome-screensaver

Poking around the net, I came across this thread, and I followed the directions to kill the gnome-screensaver:

$ killall gnome-screensaver
$ ps auxwww | grep gnome-screensaver
user 32499 0.0 0.0 3004 764 pts/1 R+ 08:34 0:00 grep gnome-screensaver

After that I played around a little and that did the trick - no more screensaver kicking on! So, following the directions a little further down in the thread I turned it off permanently:

$ gconftool-2 --type boolean -s /apps/gnome_settings_daemon/screensaver/start_screensaver false

So at this point I think I finally have all the screensavers, DPMS, etc. turned off on my MythBuntu box using the directions above.

Update 11/3/2008: Well, the gconftool-2 command above didn't persist through a reboot. So following these directions, I did the following (will update when I've confirmed if it worked or didn't):

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/gnome-screensaver/idle_activation_enabled false

Update 1/10/2009: Well, the above didn't work. Next I tried directions in this post. First, I ran "gconf-editor" from a command-line. Then I selected "Apps" and "gnome-screensaver". Under the options for "gnome-screensaver" I deselected the option for "idle_activation_enabled".

After that, I rebooted and re-ran gconf-editor to make sure the "idle-activation_enabled" variable was still de-selected and it was. I've been watching my mythtv system idle now for over an hour and no screensaver. Success finally.