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I have a laptop with an absolutly useless monitor (well, probably video card), so I put an Ubuntu 14.04 server on it. Of course if I turn it on, the monitor still turns on and blinks in vivid colors, which is annoying and a waste of electricity. How can I disable the monitor via the commandline, so it will not get powered on? Possible the videocard as well, since that is also useless.

I have only found answers related to the X11-server-utils, but those don't even find the monitor (not really suprising, as I can only connect through ssh).

fbence
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2 Answers2

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setterm --blank 1
setterm --blank force
setterm --powersave powerdown

The above or perhaps a subset of them should work.

Personally, if it's really broken, I'd open the laptop and disconnect the cable running to the screen.

wurtel
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  • Yes, it would probably be easier, but this is more interesting :) So I'd would kind of like to learn how to do this.

    I tried your suggestions, they all work with only one "-", but beside that the first two does nothing, the third one gives me an error:

    setterm: cannot (un)set powersave mode: Inappropriate ioctl for device

     – fbence Oct 22 '15 at 18:29
  • The combination of the first 2 should cause the screen to be turned off after 1 minute. Check the manpage to setterm. Note you need to do this on the screen itself, ssh'ing into the system and then doing this won't work. You could try TERM=linux setterm --blank 1 > /dev/tty1 etc. (wierd that your setterm doesn't take the -- long argument thing.) – wurtel Oct 23 '15 at 07:57
  • Hmm, probably some version thing, it gives setterm: argument error with -- and prints the help, and everything is with -. Anyway I tried putting what you gave me to /dev/tty1, again nothing. Maybe I should try disabling the video card. – fbence Oct 28 '15 at 17:46
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I found the answer here: tty (console): disable monitor.

The command line utility vbetool can be used to turn the monitor on or off: vbetool dpms off

Community
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fbence
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