Blanking the laptop screen
I leave my workstations on 24×7, 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.
Kavros wrote:
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
Posted on 21-Jun-06 at 10:34 am | Permalink
Ethem ERSOZ wrote:
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.
Posted on 02-Jul-06 at 1:10 pm | Permalink
Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier wrote:
Enthem,
It turns the backlight off on my Thinkpad, but maybe it differs for other types of LCDs.
Posted on 02-Jul-06 at 9:26 pm | Permalink
vince wrote:
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?
Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 1:49 am | Permalink