[arch-general] Turning off the screen for privacy

[Zachary Kline]

Hi All,

One of the perks of being blind is that I don’t need the screen to work. I prefer to keep it off for privacy whenever possible.
On earlier hardware, I used to be able to use the vbetool command to turn off the screen. Nowadays that seems no longer to work, “vbetool dpms off,” returns “illegal instruction.”

I was wondering if anybody knew of a way too do this under current versions of Arch? Ideally, I could turn off the screen for both virtual consoles and X sessions, whenever i get around to installing Gnome. I realize this is a bit of an unusual request. Sadly, my laptop doesn’t have any easily identified hardware buttons to do this sort of thing.
Thanks for any tips,
Zack.