Live Chat!

turn off laptop LCD monitor

          0 votos

November 12th, 2006 mysurface Posted in Misc, X11, cat, xset | Hits: 13426 |

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.

Related Posts
what is your 10 common linux commands?
Dear command line ninjas, Mr CLI and keyboard pianist: What is your regular command you use? I am sure you must think...

Generating Random numbers
We can obtain pure random (NOT pseudo-random) bytes from /dev/random. Linux kernel harnesses a good source of randomness...

How to generate system hardware profile for your laptop?
Recently, MIS department request us for hardware and software profile. They provide us Belarc Advisor (personal pc audit...

12 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.

Leave a Reply