Historically if you wanted to control blanking and DPMS in X, you could do it with xset. Issuingxset -dpms on my laptop results in xset q returning "DPMS is Disabled", as it should.

But my screens still turn off.

I'm running an up-to-date Arch Linux using KMS with integrated Intel graphics, I'm not running GNOME or willing to use anything that needs something like it. I am however stuck with DBUS and HAL.

I've tried fiddling with the various timeouts, and it hasn't helped - specifically, changing the timeouts seems to be able to turn off the screen sooner, but not stop it from turning off :) This makes me suspect that there's something else overriding the setting.

Is there any way to get xset to actually function as it used to, or at least stop lying to me?

Note that I don't want to permanently disable DPMS or blanking - just to be able to control it when I need to.