Suspend on lid-close

[firefexx]

Hi,

I recently installed LMDE with Cinnamon and observed some strange behaviour concerning suspend.
When logged in as a user, suspend when closing laptop-lid works as expected.
But when nobody is logged in, i.e. the log in screen is visible, nothing happens when closing the laptop-lid.

Could someone assist in fixing this issue?

[Monsta]

But when nobody is logged in, i.e. the log in screen is visible, nothing happens when closing the laptop-lid.

When nobody is logged in, it's MDM that's active, not Cinnamon. You may try another display manager (e.g. LightDM) for experiment.

[firefexx]

Thank you for your answer, but lightdm doesn't suspend on lid-close, too.
lightdm works for me under Fedora but not with LMDE.

[chrisonmint]

Hi,

I recently installed LMDE with Cinnamon and observed some strange behaviour concerning suspend.
When logged in as a user, suspend when closing laptop-lid works as expected.
But when nobody is logged in, i.e. the log in screen is visible, nothing happens when closing the laptop-lid.

Could someone assist in fixing this issue?

This problem was annoying me too, so I did a bit of looking around. Linux mint uses the "mint display manager" aka MDM and I found that there are some terminal commands and config files which will solve this for you.

'logind' is the command line tool which handles the login screen. It has a config file here /etc/systemd/logind.conf and you can read about all the different options in a terminal window by typing

Code: Select all

man logind.conf

The important line(s) for us are the following. In the default setup, all are set to 'ignore'. I changed the lid switch and power button to read 'suspend':

Code: Select all

HandlePowerKey=suspend
HandleSuspendKey=ignore
HandleHibernateKey=ignore
HandleLidSwitch=suspend

For each option, you can choose from:
ignore, poweroff, reboot, halt, kexec, suspend, hibernate, hybrid-sleep and lock

You will need to edit the conf file as root, so type the following:

Code: Select all

sudo pico /etc/systemd/logind.conf 

- if you are not familiar with pico (or its cousin, nano which is also installed) then I strongly recommend it. Much simpler than vi, although less powerful. Its a simple text editor and when you are finished, type ctrl-o to save the file and then ctrl-x to exit.

[Pjotr]

@chrisonmint: thanks for this cool solution!