For those having issues with the screen turning off

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Aha -  I could see the login dial pad screen momentarily a few times, but mostly it was blank all the rest of the time I kept trying stops/starts/restarts that tantalized me with just some of the start/stop console messages, so I knew the screen was physically ok (and it works perfectly on UPports, but I hate the Unity UI, as I did with older Ubuntu PC versions, so went with Mint/Mate instead for its classic Gnome 2 look).

Could any of you who have solved this problem see if you can find a setting in a configuration file that controls this behavior, and post here if you find it?  That would let the rest of us pull the SD card to edit on a PC to skip all that trial and error frustration (with much thankfulness to the helpful "pioneers"  ;-}  ).

TIA!

The config file is /var/lib/mce/builtin-gconf.values. Here is the output from mine:

[nemo@PinePhone ~]$ cat /var/lib/mce/builtin-gconf.values
/system/osso/dsm/display/als_autobrightness=false
/system/osso/dsm/display/color_profile=hardcoded
/system/osso/dsm/display/display_dim_timeout=600
/system/osso/dsm/display/display_brightness=69
/system/osso/dsm/display/max_display_brightness_levels=100

Change als_autobrightness to false. If the file does not exist, then create it manually. You can copy my settings above. If the als_autobrightness line does not exist in the file, then add it manually.