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I'm managing 100+ (mostly offline) KDS 66T touchscreens running Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS (lucid).

I recently noticed that the two (offline) test machines in our office have black screens every Wednesday morning. A touch removes the black and the displays seem to display their offline browser movies just fine for a week again, so it does seem to be related to idleness - i've set the date back and it turns out that it occurs while idle before 11:48 PM on Tuesdays. There are no crontabs for the active user or root.

I've already tried the screensaver and power management GUIs, a modified xorg.conf and gconftool-2, to no avail. All those settings seem to be for daily idle behavior.

What could cause these offline distros to blank the screen every week? And could i prevent that using an automated script ran from a USB stick? These machines lack keyboards and savvy users, so getting them to alter BIOS settings to perform a full system upgrade is out of the question.

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Cees Timmerman
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    Ubuntu 10.04 is only supported for servers and unfortunately, we don't support end-of-life releases of Ubuntu. – Jo-Erlend Schinstad Oct 29 '14 at 10:41
  • Thanks. Perhaps XP was the cheaper option. Anyway, maybe someone else can help me. – Cees Timmerman Oct 29 '14 at 10:50
  • So should he just update the version of Ubuntu to one which is supported? In any case, this question deserves a bounty which sadly I cannot provide due to having very low reputation. –  Oct 29 '14 at 11:00
  • @luchonacho The KDS 66T has only one easily accessible USB port, and sending out hubs and keyboards as well as training people to perform an upgrade would likely not fly. – Cees Timmerman Oct 29 '14 at 11:02

1 Answers1

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sleep 10; killall gnome-screensaver

In ~/.config/autostart/myscript.desktop might work.

sleep 5 didn't.

gnome-screensaver-command --inhibit

did, but the machine spontaneously rebooted at Tuesday 11:30 PM.

I might have to resort to this or this.

Weekly reboots at night could be a feature, so i'll call it that. This is my final script, if anyone else is stuck maintaining legacy machines:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# sleep 5; killall gnome-screensaver  # too soon
gnome-screensaver-command inhibit

I checked last -x and according to cat /var/log/messages |grep 23:30:0, rsyslogd 4.2.0 exited on signal 15 (SIGTERM) from itself at 23:30:01. I found the reboot cause via this: cron. But even as root, crontab -l says there are no crontabs!

Sure enough, cat /etc/crontab shows 30 23 * * 2 root reboot. Root has its own crontab.

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Cees Timmerman
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