Screen locked on laptop after lid has been closed. SOLVED

[Mr_Shifty]

I used to run Fluxbox on Ubuntu as well as on Linux Mint (standard) 7 and 8, and I had this exact same problem then. I close my laptop lid and leave the laptop idle for several minutes.

When I open the lid again, I'm treated to a blank screen (not the screen saver I have set in Xscreensaver), and when I try to work, I find that my screen has been locked. I should add that in Xscreensaver, the "Lock screen after X minutes" checkbox is unchecked. Also, under the "Advanced" tab in Xscreensaver, I have display power management disabled.

My solution to this problem before was to add "gnome-power-manager &" to my .fluxbox/startup file, which seemed to force things to behave.

However, since gnome-power-manager isn't installed in Linux Mint 8 Fluxbox CE (and I'd like to avoid installing it if at all possible), this isn't a solution.

In fact, I've been meaning to ask... since there's no gnome-power-manager, and there doesn't seem to be an equivalent anywhere that I can find that's present out of the box, what is the recommended way to manage my power settings in this release? I like to be able to control what happens when on AC, when on battery, when the lid is closed in either of those cases, et cetera.

[Kendall]

Hi Trent,

xfce4-power-manager works well, I don't like it as much as the gnome one, but it's very light weight and very functional. Be sure to grab the xfce4-power-manager-plugins package for some added functionality.

You'll need to add "xfce4-power-manager &" to your startup script as well.

[Mr_Shifty]

Thanks, Kendall, I'll give that a try.

[Mr_Shifty]

While I'd hoped that there was some method of power management included in this without installing something additional, I can see why one might want to keep things like power daemons and other background processes to a minimum in a Fluxbox-centric distro like this.

Xfce-power-manager seems to be pretty light compared to gnome-power-manager; I've installed it and added it to my .fluxbox/startup and that took care of my screen locking/lid closing issues. Thanks!

[Kendall]

The whole logic behind it was to have as few background processes running as possible. Details like this really matter for old systems with 256 MB of RAM or less.

[Mr_Shifty]

The whole logic behind it was to have as few background processes running as possible. Details like this really matter for old systems with 256 MB of RAM or less.

Yep, I definitely get that. If I were testing this on a desktop, I probably wouldn't have even noticed it.