I have a box running kodi in standalone mode with X11. My TV displays “no signal” if I leave it for too long, does anyone know how to stop this from happening?

I can still ssh into the box and use the remote app Kore so the system hasn’t suspended or anything like that.

Pressing up/down etc on the kore remote, which should change what is displayed on screen, doesn’t wake kodi up. However, I can wake it up if I tell Kodi to play a video.

  • @AlpacaChariotOPEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Apparently you can put whatever you like in the identifier field and it’s not verified by X. So I changed to

    Section “Monitor” Identifier “TV” Option “dpms” “false” EndSection

    That got rid of the error but it still wasn’t working.

    Trying another method with xset:

    kodi@kodi:~$ xset -dpms xset: unable to open display “”

    I figured out I need to specify a display since I’m connecting with ssh:

    DISPLAY=:0 xset -q

    This shows me that dpms was still on even after rebooting with the /etc/xorg.conf.d/10-monitor.conf file in place.

    Anyway I ran the following commands:

    DISPLAY=:0 xset -dpms DISPLAY=:0 xset s off DISPLAY=:0 xset s noblank DISPLAY=:0 xset s noexpose DISPLAY=:0 xset s 0 0

    The commands are explained here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Display_Power_Management_Signaling

    Now an xset query returns:

    kodi@kodi:~$ DISPLAY=:0 xset -q Keyboard Control: auto repeat: on key click percent: 0 LED mask: 00000000 XKB indicators: 00: Caps Lock: off 01: Num Lock: off 02: Scroll Lock: off 03: Compose: off 04: Kana: off 05: Sleep: off 06: Suspend: off 07: Mute: off 08: Misc: off 09: Mail: off 10: Charging: off 11: Shift Lock: off 12: Group 2: off 13: Mouse Keys: off auto repeat delay: 660 repeat rate: 25 auto repeating keys: 00ffffffdffffbbf fadfffefffedffff 9fffffffffffffff fff7ffffffffffff bell percent: 50 bell pitch: 400 bell duration: 100 Pointer Control: acceleration: 2/1 threshold: 4 Screen Saver: prefer blanking: no allow exposures: no timeout: 0 cycle: 0 Colors: default colormap: 0x20 BlackPixel: 0x0 WhitePixel: 0xffffff Font Path: /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc,/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled,/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled,/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1,/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi,/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi,built-ins DPMS (Energy Star): Standby: 600 Suspend: 600 Off: 600 DPMS is Disabled

    I also added the commands above to ~/.xinitrc so hopefully they will be run automatically every time

    – edit:

    So, although those xset commands work I have to run them every time, the commands in .xinitrc clearly aren’t being run.

    I have a feeling this is because kodi is being started using xinit run from a systemd unit file so it isn’t reading /kodi/home/.xinitrc.

    So the plan is to set the home environment variable in the unit file (like below) and see if that works. Will test when the box is free.

    Environment=“HOME=/home/kodi”