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turn off laptop LCD monitor

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November 12th, 2006 mysurface Posted in Misc, X11, cat, xset | Hits: 28895 |

In order to save power, I often turn off my LCD monitor when I away from keyboard for long. Bare in mind, blank screen is not consider turn off the monitor, because it still uses backlight. To do that, first you need to make sure you have ACPI enabled in your kernel.

cat /proc/acpi/info

If this exist, then you can turn off the monitor by running the command line bellow.

xset dpms force off

xset is a util for setting property of X, dpms force off is to turn off the backlight.

What if I want to set it so that it can be done automatically? Check out xscreensaver at advance tab, there are power management where your can set the duration of getting idle it turns off the backlight. Another alternative you can do is to edit your xorg.conf. Check out this gentoo wiki and mini-HowTo for more information.

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15 Responses to “turn off laptop LCD monitor”

  1. Friheden til at vælge » SlÃ¥ laptop LCD skærmen fra Says:
    November 13th, 2006 at 12:35 am

    [...] Du kan læse mere her [...]

  2. me Says:
    December 1st, 2006 at 3:08 pm

    this doesn’t work

  3. mysurface Says:
    December 2nd, 2006 at 12:25 am

    Well, It is either your ACPI is disabled at your kernel or your kernel do not support that at all. It works under linux kernel 2.6.14.

    Check again, and good luck.

  4. mike Says:
    December 3rd, 2006 at 2:21 am

    this blanks my screen, but doesn’t actually turn
    the monitor off. Is there some trick to actually
    get it to power off?

    By the way, it monitor is an X2GEN LCD tv, so
    I don’t know if there are some limitations with
    those.

  5. mysurface Says:
    December 3rd, 2006 at 3:03 am

    A lots of possibilities and uncertainties, depends on what linux kernel you are running, and whether the kernel is compiled with enable ACPI support or not.

    It might be also happen when some programs also did call ACPI functions. Which it happens to me when I switch off the backlight, will be do the blank screen instead, due to xscreensaver is running at the backgroup process. I kill the xscreensaver, and still X windows by default do call some ACPI functions.

    You can read the references I post, It do help to make you understand how ACPI works on linux. Wish you good luck, if you find the solution, please do not hesitate to share with us, might be a lots of us have the same problem you are facing now.

  6. raymond Says:
    January 11th, 2007 at 9:56 pm

    works great for me, once i emerged xset. i’m running gentoo, linux smp 2.1.18-r6 and my LCD is an Apple CinemaHD 23″

    thanks for the info and good work.

  7. J4nus Says:
    September 25th, 2007 at 7:15 am

    Works well thanks a lot

    To power on the screen, just move the mouse and wait for a while..

  8. Dzoza Says:
    February 14th, 2008 at 10:16 am

    Hi,

    Thank you for this tip, now how can I make a bat. file and place it on my desktop?
    Or even create a hot key for ths?

  9. dvd video Says:
    March 4th, 2008 at 5:24 am

    Works good for me too. ive searching how do this for some time..

  10. lcd monitor will not turn off Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 2:03 pm

    [...] [...]

  11. Syd Says:
    August 4th, 2008 at 6:15 am

    Thanks man! That was a cool trick! :)

  12. flows Says:
    August 5th, 2008 at 6:32 am

    Exactly what I was looking for. Really, you don’t have to waste energy while waiting for a file operation to finish.

  13. fabioxxxx Says:
    September 15th, 2008 at 6:28 am

    Thanks a lot dude ..my NB has a exhaustion exit under the screen so close it generate heat on the screen.”I Like to sleep and hear music, but set the screensaver to shutdown the screen every time sucks”

    Shortcut on the KeyBoard
    installing:
    $ apt-get install xbindkeys xbinkeys-config
    create default file:
    $ xbindkeys –defaults > ~/.xbindkeysrc
    to start the daemon:
    $ xbindkeys &
    to configure the app:
    $xbindkeys-config
    add the command in the session initialization
    $gnome-session-properties
    xbindkeys

    see ya

  14. Dr. Sharath Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 3:00 am

    Hey,
    This is a really neat trick. I just created a custom launcher and put in on my panel. All I need to do now to switch off the screen is to click on the launcher. Helps me save a lot of battery. Just like fabioxxxx above, I like to sleep listening to music and there is no point in keeping the monitor on if you don’t need it right?

    Thanx a lot dude!!! Really…. :-)

  15. M.S. Babaei Says:
    July 26th, 2009 at 6:37 am

    tnxXx!!
    I installed pommed on my gentoo box to get my MPB keyboard features back on GNU/Linux.
    The only thing I missed is How to turn off monitor just like OS X??
    Now I assigned this useful command to F12 key in ccsm.
    But I’m wondering how to assign it for example to fn+F3 key??

    tnxXx again!!

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