Quick Tip: X Server standby

Sometimes you need standby for your Xorg server and sometimes not (surveillance applications don’t need it). I will try to show you in several lines how you can configure that.

To control standby for your monitor you need to see if you have enabled Display Power Management Signaling enabled.

For that try to run following command in a xterm

$xset q
DPMS (Energy Star):
Standby: 1200 Suspend: 1800 Off: 2400
DPMS is Enabled
Monitor is On

if is not enabled just run

$xset +dpms


To set standby, suspend and off parameters run
$xset dpms X Y Z
where X is standby time, Y is suspend time and Z is off time all in seconds.

To set that at every Xorg boot then you should add the following lines to your xorg.conf
Section “ServerFlags”
Option “blank time” “150″
Option “standby time” “300″
Option “suspend time” “600″
Option “off time” “1200″
Option “dpms” “true”
EndSection

If you want to disable DPMS standby then put this configuration in your xorg.conf

Section “ServerFlags”
Option “blank time” “0″
Option “standby time” “0″
Option “suspend time” “0″
Option “off time” “0″
Option “dpms” “false”
EndSection

Also read here http://www.randombugs.com/linux/disable-monitor-standby-xorg-xserver.html

Quick Tip: Untrusted application launcher

If you copy your shortcuts from one system to another and you don’t preserve the right attributes on this files then is possible to get a warning everytime when you run a application from your desktop or your menus.

This shortcut should be a *.desktop file and it should have your rights on it or it should have minimum read and execute for group or others.

to fix that just run

sudo chmod ugo+rx *.desktop

That means you give rx rights (read and execute) to ugo (user, group and other).
So now, you also learned how to set the proper file rights

I know you can also use mark as trusted button, but is very useful when you have more than 40 shortcuts on your desktop.