I leave my workstations on 24x7, but I always turn off my monitors when I'm away from the desk for more than a few minutes so as to save energy and preserve the LCD backlights as long as possible.
Unfortunately, I've never had a laptop that allows you to just shut down the LCD while leaving the machine on and running. I'm not talking about suspending or hibernating the laptop -- just turning off the display. I still want to be able to SSH into the laptop, so I don't want it powered off or "sleeping."
Did a bit of Googling this afternoon and came up with this to power off the LCD when I want to turn the laptop screen off for a bit:
xset -display :0 dpms force off
I set this up as a launcher button on my GNOME desktop, so all I have to do is click the icon and the display is turned off. When I'm ready to use the laptop again, all I need to do is hit the touchpad or space bar and it's up and ready to go.
4 Comments
hi, how do you set that up as a launcher button? i pressume you mean a .exe thing right? but anyway i have a vaio laptop, so i could use something like that! any chance of you posting how to set it up as a launcher thingy?
cheers
this is useful but, it just blanks the screen. the backlight is still on. I am looking for a real power saving solution. example: when acpi is disabled, pressing on the lid shuts down the backlight of the screen.
Enthem,
It turns the backlight off on my Thinkpad, but maybe it differs for other types of LCDs.
This is really helpful because I've also been wondering how to shut off the lcd from time to time that I navigate away from my laptop. I hope that it also shuts off the backlight of the screen. Does it?