Inbuilt screensaver in VMware Workstation?

[CreativeCTR]

After switching to Workstation 15, my virtual machines have started switching to black screen if they idle for a few minutes. As they're all Linux servers running in text mode, and didn't blank the screen with Workstation 9, I don't think this is a feature of the guest OS, but something the virtual machine does.

How can I turn this off, or at least change the amount of time before the screen blanks? I am watching the output of the machines, and having to select them and press a key to see the output is driving me nuts.

I searched the docs and googled, but while I found one other user with the same problem, I didn't find any solution.

[Alex_Romeo]

Hi,

You can adapt this solution to the problem with some changes directly "/etc/vmware/config" file:

Workstation Pro 15 blocks timed screen lock on Ubuntu 18.04 host

ARomeo

[dariusd · Accepted solution]

VMware Workstation does not have its own in-built screensaver.  The Linux text-console does support screen blanking, and probably most modern distros will enable it by default when the hardware supports it.  If there was a change in behavior from Workstation 9, I would suspect that an improvement to our VGA compatibility might have brought us to a point where your guest OS now uses VGA screen-blanking where before it could not or would not.

Here are a few choices of instructions for disabling text-mode blanking in a Linux guest OS:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-server-73/how-to-disable-console-blanking-in-text-mod...

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/8056/disable-screen-blanking-on-text-console

Hope this helps!

--

Darius

[juanbyrd]

thank you so much! only this helped me, too