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noob here... searching for a while for the answer to this but haven't had any luck.

I am out of town and just fired up my laptop but got a black screen only. Totally my fault because I usually have a monitor plugged in and (with the help of an few websites) wrote a script to keep my laptop display off, but I forgot to disable it before travelling now I am kinda screwed.

I managed to get a terminal up and tried playing with xrandr but it just keeps telling me 'can't open display' whenever I try something. I don't remember what the content of the script was but xrandr sounds farmiliar.

So I am a little frustrated and could use some help.

I have an acer aspire 5315 running lubuntu (most recent stable, 13.04 I think?) Nothing fancy or crazy...jus need to get it working so I can get some work done.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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Does the Fn keys on your laptop do anything? If there are Fn keys there should be a combination that switches display, but since your script forces the display off I don't know if it would even do anything at all. If it doesn't:

Try xrandr | grep disconnected to list the disconnected displays you have, then do:

xrandr --output <monitor name (eg. LVDS-1, HDMI-1, etc)> --auto

and see if it switches back on. Well if it does, remember to disable to script this time round.

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  • The xrandr command doesn't give me anything but the 'can't open display' tried passing several arguments but they just return the same thing. The Fn keys done do anything either... I am going to do some more looking around. Thanks for the suggestions.
    – user256493
    Mar 9, 2014 at 23:48
  • @user256493 Ah sorry about that. If you still remember where the script was you can try using cp to move it out to Desktop or some directory which the system won't use for loading. I would guess the /etc/X11/ folder if it helps you remember anything. Mar 10, 2014 at 7:04
  • Simple but good call. Ill have a look at that a little later. I know I backed it all up, just a matter of remembering how I did it. Thanks!
    – user256493
    Mar 10, 2014 at 12:49
  • So finally had a chance to look at this again. After researching I got the idea to change the /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf file so it booted to the guest user instead of the main user that had the doctored file to shut down LVDM1. Worked great except the guest account has very limited permissions...so I logged back in as main in the terminal and created a new user with general permissions and now I am at least able to function with a. GUI. Still not sure were I put that script but ill find it eventually...
    – user256493
    Mar 11, 2014 at 1:10

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