Out of the box my debian system doesn’t kill the backlight on my t60p using the familiar Fn-F3 key combination, because
the ibm-acpi script responding to that key (/etc/acpi/thinkpad-lockorbattery.sh) has some retarded logic about detecting which thinkpads use that key for different purposes.
Once you gut all the conditionals in that script, it will successfully use xscreensaver to blank the display and turn off the backlight (which boils down to xset dpms force off)
An additional thing I’m doing diff on my t60 is no longer running cpufreqd and managing power consumption via the /etc/acpi/battery.d and /etc/acpi/ac.d directories. For the time being I am setting the cpufreq governor to powersave and dropping display brightness in addition to whatever ACPI is doing on its own
