On Fri, 07 Oct 2011 09:08:25 +0100, Invisible wrote:

>>>> Mine never turns off on its own.  Just switched between several VTs
>>>> and my X session, the state didn't change at all.
>>>
>>> OK, well I guess it varies by distro then. This was, IIRC, Debian
>>> "potato".
>>
>> Possible.  At the very least, there are ways to configure it to not do
>> what you're seeing, but not knowing Debian, I couldn't tell you how on
>> that distribution.
> 
> Quite. As I recall, stopping the shell doing this involved editing
> ~/.bashrc and setting an environment variable or something like that.

An environment variable on its own wouldn't do anything.  It's got to be 
used by something, obviously. :)

>>>> "in the shell" - do you mean on a VT?  Or is it changing when you
>>>> open a term window in X?
>>>
>>> I mean in the text-mode screen that appears before you tell X Windows
>>> to start up. (I didn't have it configured to run at startup.)
>>
>> That's a "virtual terminal" or VT.  aka the "Console".
> 
> Oh, right. I thought that refers only to when you run an X application
> that emulates a terminal in a window.

That's technically called a 'pseudoterminal' - pts.  "man pts" is 
interesting reading, if you like that sort of thing.

Jim

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