Disabling Screen Blanking (or turning off the root screen saver)

If you’ve got a few boxes around your workspace, you occasionally might like to be logged on as root (you normally shouldn’t be logged on as root unless you really have to, use su or sudo instead!) and watch something on one screen while working on another. No problem, until the screen blanks. Of course you can move a mouse, or hit a key. But wouldn’t it be good if you stop the screen from going blank in the first place? Well you can, simply follow the steps below.

Open the following file in your favourite text editor.

vi /etc/rc.d/rc.local

Edit the following line, I always prefer to include comments.

# Turn off screen blanking, the default is usually 10 minutes
setterm -blank 0

Your screen will now always stay on.

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