Comment 44 for bug 1245474

Eugene Crosser:
> if you do assign some settings in the command line or from the display-setup script, "something" resets them back shortly afterwards.

  That would be g-s-d's power plugin. See gpm-common.c, disable_builtin_screensaver() and gsd_power_enable_screensaver_watchdog(). g-s-d's power plugin disables the DPMS timeouts because it takes over the job of doing DPMS in response to the screensaver going active (as indicated over d-bus at org.gnome.ScreenSaver). However, unity-greeter does not launch gnome-screensaver, so there is no one to indicate the screensaver is active over d-bus, so g-s-d never powers off the display.

  At this point, ISTM that the right solution is for unity-greeter to launch gnome-screensaver (with locking turned off so that it doesn't prompt for lightdm's password). However, there must be a reason that it doesn't. And that is why I am investigating the details of 13.04's solution. So that I don't end up coding the wrong solution.