Is there any way to prevent the screen from sleeping (i.e. blanking) and locking while the huge first round of updates are running?

I came back to my computer to check it's progress and the screen was black (even though I had set it to never sleep), after moving the mouse the screen was just a gradient fill that would go back to blank after a few moments, no matter how much I moved the mouse or pressed any keys. There seemed to no way to get back to the GUI to check on the progress of the updates. So, I held the power button in to force it to turn off. That was a mistake.

After powering back on the, the graphical login would no longer load. There was an error (and this is bad of me) about gkp-pam not being able to find some daemon or something. I dunno. I searched for it on these forums and came up with nothing. So, I decided to just wipe the drive and reinstall. (I didn't have anything invested in the previous install- I had just installed and then tried to let it do the first round of updates- which I let it sit overnight while I slept; I full on expected it to be finished by the next morning).

Waiting for it to finish installing again but, I'd really like to get the first round of updates to finish and it seems like letting it sleep is impeding the progress of that. But, even if I'm wrong about that, why, if I've set the display to never sleep on AC power and the computer is also set to never sleep (this is from going to System -> Preferences -> Hardware -> Power Management) is the screen still going blank after I walk away and leave it? That doesn't make sense.

Is there a program or utility like Caffeine (for Windows) or Amphetamine (for Mac) that can be used to prevent the system from sleeping? Thanks.

that sounds like the mate-screen saver crashing. I had to go to a TTY and kill "mate-screenaver"

as for the lack of gui, sounds like you rebooted while the system was updating, though that's just speculation.

as for disabling the screensaver, look under the "control panel"

Thanks for the reply.

I think you're right that it was probably the screen saver crashing. I didn't even think of the screen saver vs the power management settings. Curiously, the screen saver control panel has a button to open the power management settings but, this appears to be only one way. I don't think there's a button to the screen saver settings from the power management settings. I can't actually check this at the moment because the mate menu bar seems to have crashed. I clicked on it and it just disappeared, hasn't come back, and the desktop icons are doing this little bounce up about 20 pixels and then bounce back down every 5 - 6 seconds.

I guess I'll just have to be patient and wait for the updates to complete as they are only at 450/561 extracting & installing.

Pretty sure you're right that my reboot doing the update broke the graphical login (and also X11 for that matter because logging in and then running startx produced a non-functioning desktop).

How do you invoke a TTY in GhostBSD? I tried Ctrl-Alt-F2 (maybe I should have also use the fn key) and Ctrl-Alt-F3 and nothing happened. But, even it it had worked, I wouldn't have known to kill the mate-screensaver or remembered how to get back to X11.

Anyway, thanks for pointing out the screen saver control panel. At least, I can come back and see the icons do their dance while the updates install.

Hopefully, this system is more stable after these updates because, honestly, so far, it's not inspired a lot of confidence.

I found that MATE settings were unreliable so if you NEVER the screensaver to kick-in...

To prevent the screen from blanking you can disable screensaver etc by doing the following:
1. Open Control Center > Personal > Startup Applications > Add
and give it a name
Stop Screen Blanking
and then add the command
xset -dpms s off s noblank s 0 0 s noexpose
to the command line
then save it and restart your PC.

2. Now open Control Center > Look and Feel > Screensaver
and make sure that there are no ticks in the boxes,
Slide the slider all the way over to the right which sets it to 2 hours
Select "Power Management" button and make sure that both tabs are set to never!.

3. While you are still in the Control Center, click on "Startup Applications" and take the tick out of "Screensaver" just for good measure.

Also, if you feel adventurous you might want to open the Dconf Editor and take out the tick [0] if it is active [1].

Steve