PopOS 18.04 How can I prevent sleep/hibernate on lock screen, loginscreen and cli

Hi all,

I am experiencing the following on a number of distributions including CentOS, PopOS, Debian and Fedora. I am currently running PopOS 18.04 LTS with all updates.

The OS install goes fine. I am able to configure xfce4 (my preferred desktop). I configure the power-settings so that the machine never sleeps and never hibernates. However, every time I reboot the machine and DON’T login straightway (i.e., I let the machine stay at the login prompt if CLI or login screen on lightdm or gdm etc…) the machine goes into some kind of sleep state where I see that it is working but the monitor and keyboard shutoff (the keyboard numlock and caps keys do not light up). There is no way to get the computer back up from this state and I have to reboot. This happens every time.

Is there something that I am missing when I set the powersettings through the GUI?

Many thanks!

What distro are you using right now and is xscreensaver installed? If it is I would remove it. Oftentimes it interferes with Xfce’s power settings.

Also if it happens again, you can use Ctr + Alt + F1 e.g. to go to the tty and then back to X (GUI) with Ctr + Alt + F7. In the worst case you could reboot your machine from tty instead of a hard reboot.

Hi, thank you.

I am using PopOS 18.04 LTS

Yes and I will try removing it when I get to the machine

But its peculiar that this sort of situation only happens if I do NOT login. If I do login the screen never looses a signal and that is with screen savers running.

I am not able to do that because the keyboard and mouse are unresponsive at that point.

That is what I have been doing. Hate that about Windows so trying to switch over to avoid doing that.

It is but I saw something like this on my wife’s laptop.
As we said we could try to remove xscreensaver when you get to it and then see what happens.

Hi @vinylninja,

sorry for the late reply. So, I fiddle around with this a bit more and it looks like it has to do with gdm3. I am not sure what though. I installed lightmd, however, and this behavior is gone. I like lightdm so it works out but really wish I really knew why gdm3 is doing this.

OK. But you use Xfce, so I would recommend rather LightDM indeed because GDM, even though usable with other DEs, is tight to Gnome.

Thanks. I believe I got the same issue when using the straight out of the box PopOS install that comes with gnome but I would have to double check that.