Hello all,mates screensaver and gnome-screensaver cause my keyboard not to work when it is locked. I installed xscreensaver and it does work. Any thoughts on why that might be? This is in ubuntu-mate 18.04
Hello - The problem is that once the screensaver locks the screen I have no way to type a password in to unlock the screen. The keyboard does nothing and there is not a blinking cursor in the password field. As I mentioned it does not work in both mate and gnome screensaver but does work with xscreensaver
yes and still xscreensaver works where as the other two do not
Is this a wired KB or a WiFi one?. 
Do you have suspend or hibernate active?:
Hello again…this is a desktop with a wired keyboard so none of the above apply. When I mentioned that there is no blinking cursor in the password field I think that is also part of the keyboard package. Once I try and come out of the screensaver the keyboard completely stops working. I can cntrl-alt-f1 and then the keyboard works fine again but if I go back the keyboard does not work again. so it has to be something between the keyboard and mate and gnome screensavers. As previously mentioned everything works fine with xscreensaver but was hoping it would work with mate screensaver.
Hi lapaga,
what happens if you remove Mate screensaver?, try the following terminal command (Ctrl + Alt + t):
sudo apt remove mate-screensaver
Let us know what happens.
Before my first post I had removed mate-screensaver when it caused my keyboard to not work. I then installed gnome-screensaver which also did not work. I then removed gnome-screensaver and installed xscreensaver which worked the way a screensaver or locker is supposed to. The problem is not that I do not know how to use a screensaver but the interaction between the program that runs the keyboard and the screensaver. There is probably a little bug somewhere but I would have thought that it would have applied to many others but it does not seem so.
Well thank you for your help. I think I will just call it quits on this issue as I have a work around. I will dig into it and see if I can come up with something. Thank you wolfman
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Good luck, I personally don’t use screen savers as I find them a pain, if I want to save energy, I switch off the monitor while the PC is doing something that takes time!. 
I have the same problem on sony vaio laptop, while another laptop goes fine.
Anyone have ideas how to fix it?