Lasersköld

2013-10-15

How to use a laptop with no screen

My laptop broke. So I thought of throwing it away before I realized the obvious in making a simple server from it. The most usable reason for me to turn it into a server was to be able to use the computational power to run synthesizers which my secondary computer could not manage. This is the two steps I made.

install ssh

Since I already had ubuntu installed from the beginning. The only thing I really needed to do to convert it to some kind of server was to install ssh:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Then to use the computer all I needed to do on the client side was

ssh (<ip to the computer) -X

(-X is to be able to run graphical applications as nautilus, gedit, or google-chrome [but to be honest, to run google chrome over forwarded x is a bit overkill])

wake on lan

It would be possible to keep the computer turned on all the time, but because my computer makes a lot of noise I rather turn it off sporadically. Since my laptop has its power button under the lid, I figured out that it would be most practical to be able to boot it from somewhere else. And that's how I came up with the wake up on lan. For my lenovo T61 the wake on lan feature was enabled by default. I got the network card name from my router (format 00:00:00:00:00 something) and then I use the awesome command powerwake when I need to start the computer. Works like magic