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rayandrews

Member

From: Vancouver B.C. Canada

Registered: 2011-12-30

Posts: 213

monitors go on the blink after being turned off.

All,

I don't like screensavers or power monitors or blankers or any such thing, I have my monitors to stay always on, and when I want them off, I turn off the power to them.  I have three monitors, all hooked up to one power bar. That has always worked fine, but recently, if I power down then power up my monitors, two of them go a bit nuts: they look fine at first, but any touch of the mouse sends the pointer up to the panel,  where it remains stuck.  The pointer can be moved left-right, but not up-down, and the video goes slowly fuzzy all over the screen.  If I slide the pointer all the way to the right-most monitor, that monitor is fine.  This is an xfce issue almost for sure, because it does not happen at console.  If I cycle the power to my monitors while at console,  then start xfce, all is fine, also, if I start xfce, then 'Ctrl+Alt+F2' to another terminal, then cycle the power, then return to xfce, all is fine.  So it's only when xfce is 'active' that this happens.  I'm not sure what I could have done to cause this, but it predates the upgrade to 4.10.  Since then, I've been fiddling with settings but to no avail.  A tricky problem for sure, any ideas?  BTW, if I turn the power off using each monitor's power button there is no problem, so it seems to be some sort of issue between the hardware and xfce's video mode after cycling the power.  I'd not worry about it except that it didn't happen previously.

Oxihjen

Member

Registered: 2014-03-31

Posts: 4

Re: monitors go on the blink after being turned off.

Hi,

I'd say it's generally better to use the monitor's power button, instead of powering all 3 at once through a bank. Besides a small power peak, I can imagine all 3 monitors are being detected at once and xfce tries to manage them all at the same time, which again might cause issues. Perhaps it's a change in the software managing/detecting displays. This might have something to do with Settings Manager->display Or maybe the Settings Daemon; to debug try in console:

$ XFSETTINGSD_DEBUG=1 xfsettingsd --replace --no-daemon

Just some other wild guesses:
-try just 2 monitors and see if you can reproduce it (you might have to remove stored settings in the Settings Manager->display)
-try to mess some with the Settings Manager->display
-try a different videocard driver
-make sure it's not a hardware issue, ie: defect monitor
-is xfce4-power-manager maybe installed and somehow interfering?

Last edited by Oxihjen (2014-04-01 09:45:05)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,485

Re: monitors go on the blink after being turned off.

One other bit of information that would be interesting to see is the results of the command: xrandr -q before and after power-cycling all 3 monitors when within Xfce. Perhaps the issue is at the X level.

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rayandrews

Member

From: Vancouver B.C. Canada

Registered: 2011-12-30

Posts: 213

Re: monitors go on the blink after being turned off.

One other bit of information that would be interesting to see is the results of the command: xrandr -q before and after power-cycling all 3 monitors when within Xfce. Perhaps the issue is at the X level.

Guys,

Whatever it was, the problem disapeared when I moved to Debian. There's only one bug left with my xfce and that's the 'black button' issue: When xfce  starts up, the buttons at the top-right of the title bar (and the title text) are always black, but *only* on the left-most monitor. When any window on that that monitor looses focus the bar itself changes color as it should, but the buttons remain black. All other parts of the screen display fine.  Changing themes using either the 'Appearance' or 'Window Manager' widgets fixes the problem instantly.  It doesn't matter which theme is loaded at first, or which theme is switched to, the fix is always effective, so it's not the theme itself but somehow, just on first start, xfce gets the buttons wrong on just the one monitor.  This bug persisted when I moved to Debian from Mint. As to the other issue, so much changed here that it's now impossible to recreate it or say exactly when/where/why/how it got fixed.