While you’d probably never use a laptop as a server in a production environment, for a homelab, laptops actually make great Proxmox hosts. They use little power, and the battery is basically a built in UPS. However, an issue you may run into is that the laptop’s display is always on. This is typically undesirable. In this article, I’m going to show you how to easily put the screen to sleep on your Proxmox host.
In this case, we’re running Proxmox 9.0.3 on an older Dell laptop, but these instructions should apply to pretty much any system. What we want is to turn off the screen after a short period of inactivity. If you research how to do this, many people discuss changing power settings so that you can close the lid of the laptop without it sleeping… but I don’t recommend this, as laptops are designed to be used open, and it may overheat eventually if you use it with the lid closed.
Note: These instructions should work on Debian and Ubuntu systems as well, either desktops or laptops – not just Proxmox. I used the same method to make the screen go to sleep on my AI server’s monitor, which is a Lenovo ThinkStation with the monitor connected via HDMI. But, if you’re using Ubuntu, since you typically log in as a user other than root, you’ll need to run the nano, update-grub, and reboot commands as sudo.
Step 1: Edit Grub Configuration:
In your text editor of choice, edit the grub configuration. Grub is the bootloader used by Proxmox. You’re going to add “consoleblank=30” to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line. Open /etc/default/grub using your editor of choice:
nano /etc/default/grubOn my install, the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX-DEFAULT line already had one value, “quiet”. I edited this so the final result was as follows:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet consoleblank=30"
Assuming you’re using nano, save the changes with Ctrl+O, Enter, and then quit nano with Ctrl+X. Now, you need to update grub for the changes you made to take effect.
update-grubGreat! Now, reboot your “server”, ahem, laptop, for the changes to take effect. Now, after 30 seconds of no keyboard input, the display will turn off. Just press any key to wake up the system, if you need to use the screen. Hope this was helpful!