Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Ubuntu 16.04: Setting the display to turn off, turn on, and to never go to sleep.

I have an Ubuntu system I use for monitoring the network. I wanted the screen to turn on at 7am when I arrive at work and turn off at 3pm when I leave. Here's how I dd it:


  1. From the settings under Brightness and Lock I set:
    - disable Dim screen to save power
    - Set turn off screen when inactive for: Never
    - Disable Lock
  2. Then I ran chrontab -e to schedule turning the display on and off.
    0 7 * * 1-5 xset -display :0 dpms force on
    0 15 * * 1-5 xset -display :0 dpms force off
Note that I'm not root and did not sudo either of these commands. Crontab needs to be set as the user who is logged in. And "-display :0" specifies the physical screens.