Comments on: Turn your laptop screen off with a keyboard shortcut in Ubuntu Karmic

By: Jay

Jay — Sun, 23 May 2010 03:57:06 +0000

Removing the #!/bin/bash made it work for me. Can’t imagine why.

By: Ricardo

Ricardo — Fri, 21 May 2010 07:36:14 +0000

Hi!

The script by itself works pretty well (aka, running it from terminal) but if I keybind it, it won’t work..
i get this:

“Error while trying to run (~/.scripts/screen-off) which is linked to the key ()s)
but like I said, appart from this, it works like a charm

By: Doug Aitken

Doug Aitken — Thu, 06 May 2010 03:23:39 +0000

Hi Alex,

Thankyou for this, I wondered why after my Karmic upgrade I couldn’t do my sleep 1 && xset dpms force off or whatever as before.
I tried the shortcut, for some reason yours gave an error, so did a custom key on my Acer laptop, along with Windows key + s, so I tried Ctrl+` [key to the left of 1 on top row] and it works fine
I think the error message is trying to tell your the keyboard shortcut is mapped already.

By: Michelle

Michelle — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:01:54 +0000

I got the same error, so I typed what you suggested and the screen switched off, then when I moved the mouse it began going on/off until I ended the process through the System Monitor.
I didn’t get any other error messages so in this case I have no idea what happened.

By: siegie

siegie — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 20:28:46 +0000

Thanks for the tip.

By: Alex Cabal

Alex Cabal — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:52:36 +0000

Not sure what the problem might be, have you tried running it in the terminal to see what the actual error is that’s happening?
You can run it by doing:
$> cd ~/.scripts
$> ./screen-off

By: Lila

Lila — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:32:35 +0000

Thank you very much for replying.

Actually, I think it’s a lot better that it doesn’t go away when the mouse moves. The problem is that when I try using the keys assigned (and I have tried several different ones) it keeps giving me:
Error while trying to run (~/.scripts/screen-off)
which is linked to the key (6)

By: Alex Cabal

Alex Cabal — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:21:09 +0000

That’s the trick with this script–you can’t restore the screen just by moving the mouse, because the script will just shut it off again on its own. To restore your screen, you need to press the key combination you assigned to the script (in my case ctrl+alt+shift+s), or run the script again. Only when you do that will your screen restore itself. It’s not an ideal way of doing things but it’s the only workaround I could think of thanks to the bug in Karmic.

By: Lila

Lila — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:50:35 +0000

By: e

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 06:02:20 +0000

Try

gnome-screensaver-command -a && xset dpms force off

Regards,,,