vbestate

vbetool will use the VESA 0x4f0f extensions to save or restore hardware state. This will be sent to or read from stdin. This information is highly hardware specific - do not attempt to restore state saved from a different machine. This command will not work unless you are at a text console, as it interferes badly with X.

dpms

vbetool will use the VESA 0x4f10 extensions to alter the power management state of your screen. "On", "off", "standby", "suspend" and "reduced" are acceptable further options and determine which state will be activated.

vbemode

vbetool will get or set the current VESA mode. "get" will return the current mode number on stdout - "set" will set the mode to the next argument.

vgamode

vbetool will set the legacy VGA mode to the following numeric argument.

post

vbetool will attempt to run BIOS code located at c000:0003. This is the code run by the system BIOS at boot in order to intialise the video hardware. Note that on some machines (especially laptops), not all of this code is present after system boot - as a result, executing this command may result in undefined behaviour. This command must be run from a text console, as it will otherwise interfere with the operation of X.

vgastate

vbetool will enable or disable the current video card. On most hardware, disabling will cause the hardware to stop responding until it is reenabled. You probably don't want to do this if you're using a framebuffer.

The vbestate command may behave in strange ways.

The post command may result in the execution of arbitrary code that happens to be lying around in the area where chunks of your video BIOS used to be.

The VESA specification does not require that "vbemode get" provides the correct mode if the current mode was set via some means other than the VESA BIOS extensions.