smith@rockville.dg.com (R. Smith) (07/19/90)
Many apologies if this has been covered before; I just started reading this group (and will soon be disconnected from it..see below). Recently we installed a full SCO development system on our home-office computer (GATEWAY 2000 25MHz with ATI VGAWonder). My tendency is to keep all equipment turned on 24 hours per day (this machine has been on since Nov '89, for example, and two Amigas (and their monitors) have been on since about 1986). This generates a need for some method to blank the display during extended periods of inactivity. Under DOS I had a nice PD QIX-like line-bouncer that did the job quite well; same for the Amigas (Thanks, Matt). Suns, ISIs, SGIs, and others have nifty screenblankers, too. Does a screen blanking program exist for SCO's multiscreens? This blanker must blank the screen (or place a randomly moving entity thereon) after a period of inactivity. It must do this to the visible multiscreen. It must do this when NO ONE is logged in (i.e., a daemon process -- any other way requiring a constant logged-in state is fairly simple to implement but is NOT what I'm looking for). It'd be nice if it paid attention a mouse, too (screen "comes alive" on key board input OR mouse motion). If such a beast exists for this particular verion of SYS V, I'd love to hear about it. Russ Smith NOTE -- I'm about to lose the account from which this note was written, so any responses should PLEASE be sent to "smith@aic.nrl.navy.mil" or "...uunet!aic.nrl.navy.mil!smith". Thanks.
davidsen@sixhub.UUCP (Wm E. Davidsen Jr) (07/23/90)
In article <611@inpnms.ROCKVILLE.DG.COM> smith@rockville.dg.com (R. Smith) writes: | Does a screen blanking program exist for SCO's multiscreens? This blanker | must blank the screen (or place a randomly moving entity thereon) after | a period of inactivity. It must do this to the visible multiscreen. It must | do this when NO ONE is logged in (i.e., a daemon process -- any other way | requiring a constant logged-in state is fairly simple to implement but is | NOT what I'm looking for). Mine is burried in another script, but let me give you the details of how I did it, and you can roll your own in about five minutes. 1. To find the idle time on all consoles, use "who -u" 2. You're going to have to sacrifice a multiscreen. Set the cursor height to none with a cursor starting on line 14 and ending on line 10. Clear the screen with a "\f" echo in the rc file, and disable the getty on it. 3. When you setect that the system consoles have been idle too long, switch to the blank multiscreen with the echo "\033[##z" where ## is the screen you blanked earlier. I switch manually lots of times, for instance if someone walks into my office while I'm working on proprietary material, salary data, performance appraisals, etc. ie. the blank screen is useful (to me) without the blanker. -- bill davidsen - davidsen@sixhub.uucp (uunet!crdgw1!sixhub!davidsen) sysop *IX BBS and Public Access UNIX moderator of comp.binaries.ibm.pc and 80386 mailing list "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me
larryp@sco.COM (Larry Philps) (07/24/90)
In article <611@inpnms.ROCKVILLE.DG.COM> smith@rockville.dg.com (R. Smith) writes: > ... >Recently we installed a full SCO development system on our home-office >computer (GATEWAY 2000 25MHz with ATI VGAWonder). My tendency is to keep >all equipment turned on 24 hours per day >.. >This generates a need for some method to blank the display > >Does a screen blanking program exist for SCO's multiscreens? Yes. It is actually kernel code that blanks the multiscreens after a period of inactivity. The method for setting the timeout is to run the program called configure in the directory /etc/conf/cf.d. It gives you a menu of things to configure, pick the one for multiscreens. It will prompt you for a number of values, take the defaults on all of them except the one that asks for the number of seconds of idle before blanking the screen. Exit configure, run ./link_unix, and reboot. --- Larry Philps, SCO Canada, Inc (Formerly: HCR Corporation) Postman: 130 Bloor St. West, 10th floor, Toronto, Ontario. M5S 1N5 InterNet: larryp@sco.COM or larryp%scocan@uunet.uu.net UUCP: {uunet,utcsri,sco}!scocan!larryp Phone: (416) 922-1937 Fax: (416) 922-8397
vlr@dynsim2.uucp (Vic Rice) (07/29/90)
larryp@sco.COM (Larry Philps) writes: >Yes. It is actually kernel code that blanks the multiscreens after a >period of inactivity. The method for setting the timeout is to run >the program called configure in the directory /etc/conf/cf.d. It gives >you a menu of things to configure, pick the one for multiscreens. It >will prompt you for a number of values, take the defaults on all of them >except the one that asks for the number of seconds of idle before blanking >the screen. Exit configure, run ./link_unix, and reboot. Is this kernel parameter in XENIX or SCO UNIX ? I have SCO Opendesktop. The kernel parameters available under "configure" for entry 6 (Multiscreens) are: NSCRN: Multiscreens NSPTTYS: Number of psuedo-ttys on system SCRNMEM: Number of 1024 byte blocks for save screens Nothing about screen blanking. -- Dr. Victor L. Rice Litwin Process Automation