Disable screen blanking on text console

I’m running linux clusters, mostly on SLES10. The servers are mostly blades, accessed via remote console. There is a real console in the server room, but switched off.

I would like to disable the screen blanking as it serves no purpose and is a
nuisance. You have to press key to see if you are connected which is a pain. We are running in runlevel 3, so the console is in text mode, no X11 involved.

Answers:

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Method 1

You can verify what timeout the kernel uses for virtual console blanking via:

$ cat /sys/module/kernel/parameters/consoleblank
600

This file is read-only and the timeout is specified in seconds. The current default seems to be 10 minutes.

You can change that value with entering the following command on a virtual console (if you are inside an xterm you have to change to a virtual console via hitting e.g. Ctrl+Alt+F1).

$ setterm -blank VALUE

Where the new VALUE is specified in minutes. A value of 0 disables blanking:

$ cat /sys/module/kernel/parameters/consoleblank
600
$ setterm -blank 0
$ cat /sys/module/kernel/parameters/consoleblank
0

setterm has other powersaving related options, the most useful combination seems to be:

$ setterm -blank 0 -powersave off

Thus to permanently/automatically disable virtual console blanking on startup you can either:

1. add consoleblank=0 to the kernel parameters (edit grub configuration)
2. add the setterm -blank 0 command to an rc-local or equivalent startup script
3. add the setterm output to /etc/issue since /etc/issue is output on every virtual console:

   # setterm -blank 0 >> /etc/issue

Choose one alternative from the above.

Method 2

Try using this:

setterm -blank

Method 3

According to : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Display_Power_Management_Signaling#DPMS_Interaction_in_a_console_with_setterm

Prevent screen from turning off (in console)

$ setterm -blank 0 -powerdown 0

Alternatively you can disable console blanking permanently using the following command:

# echo -ne "33[9;0]" >> /etc/issue

Method 4

The only permanent solution is to add consoleblank=0 to the kernel command-line. You can view the value (which defaults to 600 seconds) in:

/sys/module/kernel/parameters/consoleblank

(note that the file is read-only). The only way to change the value of consoleblank is to reboot with the new kernel command-line option.

Method 5

I’ve implemented and tested the following configuration, which works fine on sles10, my workhorse at the moment.

In

/etc/init.d/boot.local

add

setterm -blank

it looks like that is all it takes. Thanks for Uku Loskit and Gilles for the push in the right direction.

Method 6

I was really buffled by this problem. All tricks above with using setterm and redirect from/to /dev/tty0 didn’t worked from my ssh.

Then I realized a way to disable it:

TERM=linux setterm -blank 0 -powerdown 0  -powersave off >/dev/tty0 </dev/tty0

TERM=linux replaces default TERM (which is xterm-256color on my machine), and helps setterm to query proper parameters from tty0.

You can check result by

cat /sys/module/kernel/parameters/consoleblank

It should be 0. If it is 600, trick hasn’t worked out.

Method 7

If you only want to prevent screen blank out after user login, then just need to append setterm -powersave off -blank 0 to $HOME/.bash_profile of respective users.

Method 8

/usr/bin/setterm -powerdown 0 might help also

Method 9

For those of us running Ubuntu 20.04, simply append the following code to /etc/init.d/console-setup.sh

# Set screen blank time to 5 minutes (5)
log_action_begin_msg "Setting screen blank interval to 5 minutes"
/usr/bin/setterm -blank 5
log_action_end_msg $?

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0