Container becomes unresponsive/hangs after left idle

[philipzae]

If the window is left idle for some time, when I switch back to it, its not longer responsive and then I have to close the window and restart xfce-test.

[schuellerf]

I also saw this once - but as you described, we could double check if this might be related to screensaver or powermanager idle settings!?

[philipzae]

This happens to me everytime I use it and leave it idle for a bit of time. 😄

[schuellerf]

I just checked the default settings:
Screensaver: 5min.
Powermanager screen blank: 10min.
Powermanager screen off: 15min.
you could tweak those settings (to different values to be able to distinguish) and see if one of those values impact your problem

[schuellerf]

I now tried this and I can reproduce. When you activate the screensaver xfce4-screensaver-command --activate it's non responsive
If you use the local terminal (where you started the container) and run xfce4-screensaver-command --deactivate manually everything is fine again.
Please confirm, then I would rephrase this issue with "xfce4-screensaver problem" to be fixed.
As a workaround you could increase the time or disable the screensaver.

[philipzae]

I turned of the screensaver through the screensaver settings and also tried the --deactivate option and both didn't work for me.

[schuellerf]

Please also try to disable the power management settings especially those which are screen related.

[philipzae]

Tried it and still hung.

[smac89]

Hey guys I faced this issue as well when creating the archlinux container for xfce.

The solution is to copy these files into /etc/xdg/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml folder.

It's more of a hack really because as many of you have rightly discovered, turning the screensaver off does not solve the problem. So in addition to that, we also tell the power manager to go into presentation mode from the start. This creates an inhibitor that disables most (all?) powersaving features.

I also reported the issue on gitlab.

[smac89]

From the comment given by @ochosi on gitlab, it looks like we can turn off display power management from the xserver by passing the option: -dpms. This option will actually cause the power manager not to be started, and from a small test, it behaves the same as enabling presentation mode.