Manually Invoke Standby for Laptop

Novell Cool Solutions: Tip
By Michael L. Farrell

PROBLEM: I'm on a plane flight using my linux laptop and I need to conserver battery power by manually turning off the lcd screen when I'm not looking at it.

SOLUTION: On a dpms-enabled X-server setup, this this is quite easy to do.

Just open up a terminal of your choice (xterm, konsole, gnome-terminal) and type the following command:

Similarly, if you are using a CRT monitor and you want to manually invoke a monitor standby, you can use this command:

EXAMPLE: Once you get the hang using the xset command, you can implement it in more advanced graphical scripts like the following example program:

!/bin/bash
xmessage -center -timeout 5 -buttons "" Standby in 5 Seconds... Keep mouse still &
sleep 5
xset dpms force standby

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