9fans archive / 1998 / 09 / 76 /    prev next

From: Russ Cox rsc@pla...
Subject: [9fans] screenblanker
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1998 01:15:29 -0400

The screen blanker is (and always has been) at
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/~rsc/plan9/blanker.txt

It's an embarrassing piece of code.  My only defense
is that it was almost two years ago.

The screen blanking really belongs in 8½, not
outside it, and really should have help from the
hardware to make it effective (e.g.. echo -n blank >/dev/vgactl;
echo -n unblank >/dev/vgactl).

That said, the boddle in blanker.txt does work
as advertised without these things.

A nice compromise might be to take Scott Schwartz's vga hardware
modifications and rewrite the shell script included in 
blanker.txt to take advantage of them.

Russ