Probably all of you will ask: Why should I disable monitor standby? This is usefull in a monitoring environment when you have a lot of video cameras or when you monitor (with nagios for example) a lot of critical hosts and for sure you will don’t want to move your mouse or touch the keyboard every time when the display is going blank (or blak).

Firs of all you will need to see if your video card support DPMS. Just run xset q and see if something like appears:

$ xset q
DPMS (Energy Star):
Standby: 1200 Suspend: 1800 Off: 2400
DPMS is Enabled
Monitor is On

To disable this settings just run from console

$ xset dpms 0 0 0
$ xset q
DPMS (Energy Star):
Standby: 0 Suspend: 0 Off: 0
DPMS is Enabled
Monitor is On

or you can just disable dpms:

$xset -dpms

If you want to do this permamnetly the just add the next lines to your xorg.conf

Section “ServerFlags”
Option “blank time” “0″
Option “standby time” “0″
Option “suspend time” “0″
Option “off time” “0″
Option “dpms” “false”
EndSection