Quick tip: Turning off laptop display under Debian 10

I’m running my rusty old ThinkPad T430s Laptop as (quite capable) homelab VM host under Linux/KVM running playground VMs. And because I’m accessing this machine only remotely over RDP I don’t have use for the internal laptop display.

After looking around what is the best way to turn the internal laptop display off I’ve settled for a simple solution using the linux command vbetool.

For this to work please ensure that no display manager (like GDM, LightDM) is running after the boot up of the system. If so disable the start of the display manager during the boot up of the linux system (here I’m disabling lightdm):

systemctl disable lightdm

Install vbetool

sudo apt-get install vbetool

Control the Display

Turn of the internal laptop display off…

sudo vbetool dpms off

… and on again …

sudo vbetool dpms on