A lot of us on laptops using Intel’s onboard GMAX3100 are having to do something called the “sleep trick” to get our screens to display Mac OS X after you boot or reboot. The most common way to perform this trick is to set a hot corner (Expose) to “Sleep Display” and blindly move your mouse over to the spot, hoping it wakes the screen up and displays your new Mac. For most of us, this trick works well. For the power user (or those without Sleep), we’re constantly booting up and shutting down to save battery life.
The biggest issue is since Expose uses your user settings, you have to leave Automatic Login on for your user account to get access to that hot spot. This leaves our Hackbooks at risk for theives to just boot right up, and if they figure out how the fuck to turn on the screen, they’ve got access to all your data. Not anymore! By following my instructions below, you can have a more natural experience by forcing the display to sleep automatically during boot, BEFORE you reach the Login screen!
Download the SleepDisplay Hack
Drag SleepDisplay.app to your home directory. In Finder, this is the “place” that is shown with your username.
Open Terminal and type sudo su - then open /etc/rc.common with your favorite text editor (as root), and at the top, add the following:
# Sleep display on boot
/Users/richard/SleepDisplay.app/Contents/MacOS/sleepdisplay
Replace “richard” with your username, or the full path to the location of SleepDisplay.app plus the trailing path you see above. Save the file and type head -n 5 /etc/rc.common to make sure it’s in there. Good? OK. Now go to System Preferences, Accounts, Login Options and disable automatic login. Keep Expose set to the hot corner as a fail over in case an update wipes your rc.common changes. Now reboot. Need I say more? If you’re ever stuck with a blank screen, just touch your mouse and boom — it’s up. No hot corner bullshit. If for any reason this doesn’t work, the hot corner is still there so just pretend you’re looking at the Login screen, type your password and hit Enter, then move your mouse to the Expose corner.
Easy, huh?
