This is mostly a copy of a Mastodon thread, but I’m leaving it here in the naive hope that search will be good again someday and that people with specific questions about specific problems will be able to find specific answers. This is not a big deal, but it took a lot longer to figure out than it should have, so maybe I can save you some time.
I am spending most of my personal computing time in consoles these days, fun if a bit of a throwback. On my machine, though, an annoyance was that the screen was blanking after a minute of inactivity, and I wanted to change that.
My challenge was that the presumptive default for this setting is 600 seconds, and I have set “consoleblank=0” in the kernel boot parameters, meaning “never do that”. But it kept doing that. I could have forced the issue and changed that after it booted, sure, but that’s not really the right approach when something you cannot see or change is setting a kernel parameter to something you don’t want. And despite all the userland-visible evidence I had, the fact of it was that that this machine blanked its console after 60 seconds, and the there was no text in /etc or wherever the systemd nonsense is any other reasonable place I could think to look that would admit the existence of the number “60” associated with startup or console anything.
The turn of phrase that inspired the process that led in turn to eventual victory was when Brian Cantrill mentioned in an Oxide podcast that the real zen of debugging starts by asking “what question would you like to be able to answer”, and then building towards a place you can get that answer you need. I’d been asking “where is consoleblank being set”, which didn’t have an answer; by instead changing the question to “what else might be setting consoleblank?”, in short order the answer revealed itself.
The Debian “laptop-mode” package, whose intentions are pure and whose sins are numerous, includes a configuration file called “terminal-blanking.conf” whose sins are also numerous, most notably for our purposes that it measures time in minutes instead of seconds and never references what it’s changing in the configuration files.
And “BATT_TERMINAL_BLANK_MINUTES=1” in terminal-blanking.conf is right there. The strings “consoleblank” and “60” don’t appear in that file, why would you want that when you’re just setting the consoleblank parameter to 60 and you could just have a whole different name and measure and can’t grep for anything, that’s just how we roll here in the best of all possible worlds.
Anyway, that’s how I solved my problem. I hope it’s helpful to you.
Also, listen: it doesn’t need to be like this. We don’t need to do this to ourselves.
