Tag Archives: gnome

Gnome 3: Setting the screen lock delay to more than 15 minutes

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Gnome since 3.8 has restricted the Blank Screen time to between 1 and 15 minutes, or “Never”, to disable screen blanking/locking entirely. If this isn’t granular enough, you can set other values like so:
<del datetime="2014-03-25T22:25:42+00:00">dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/session/idle-delay 1800</del>
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay 1800
The value is in seconds, so here we set the delay to 30 minutes (60*30=1800). It seems that once doing this, the UI will show “Never”, but the set value is still used correctly.
There is also a “Presentation Mode” shell extension that adds a button to inhibit screen lock, but for me, I still wanted to have it automatically lock, but just a little bit slower.

EDIT: dconf didn’t actually work! Apparently gsettings is the way to go.

Shorter trackpad-disabling timeout with Gnome 3 (Fedora 17)

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Gnome 3 has the option of disabling the trackpad while the user is typing. (System Settings -> Mouse and Touchpad -> Touchpad) However, it uses a timeout of two seconds. Two seconds doesn’t sound like much, but it may be enough to feel weird — at least it did for me.

When you check that option, all Gnome is doing is running a utility called “syndaemon”, and it uses a 2 second timeout. We can adjust the timeout by running this ourselves when we login:

  1. Make sure Gnome doesn’t also run syndaemon by keeping the aforementioned checkbox unchecked
  2. Run gnome-session-properties, after entering alt-F2 or from the commandline.
  3. Click Add, and then enter Syndaemon, /usr/bin/syndaemon -i 0.5 -K -R, and any comment you want
  4. Click Save.
  5. Logout and back in

If you run “ps ax|grep synd” you will see syndaemon has been started with your settings. 0.5 seconds works for me but feel free to experiment.