A crucial, yet apparently missing feature for laptops...

[avieth]

I'm a laptop user, and I like for my laptop to sleep when the lid is closed... most of the time.

Sometimes, however, I like to close the lid and have the computer not sleep, like when I just want to quickly move it.

The solution: a switch that will inhibit any attempt by the machine to suspend/hibernate/blank screen.

For some reason I can't find this feature. There seems to be plenty of support for inhibiting 'automatic' sleep, but that support doesn't extend to actions like closing the lid.

I put this thread under Desktop Environments because I've always used a graphical power management interface. Right now I'm using Gnome, and gnome-power-manager's inhibit applet is garbage, but it's the closest thing to what I want.

Any ideas? Does such a thing exist?

[DaggyStyle]

you can define a event per power scheme, on my laptop, when it is plugged, nothing happens when I close the lid (power goes off after a minute) but when I'm on battery, closing the lid results in suspend to ram.
also, don't know about gnome, but there are buttons in kde's powerdevil which cause hibernate and suspend to ram, you can assign default keystrokes for them.

btw, afaik, no other os can do that, an os cannot guess when you want to lock the screen or go to hibernate on it self.

[dmpogo]

I have setup my laptop to both hibernate and sleep when lid is closed, but do it only after some delay (20 sec or so) and if lid opens before that, cancel everything.

This way quick lid openning does nothing, more prolonged avoids reboot, and if I forget and battery runs out I have hibernated image to start from.

[albright]

I have setup my laptop to both hibernate and sleep when lid is closed, but do it only after some delay (20 sec or so) and if lid opens before that, cancel everything.

very clever - is this setup via the acpi default.sh script? Some more details would be
appreciated

thanks

[avieth]

I have setup my laptop to both hibernate and sleep when lid is closed, but do it only after some delay (20 sec or so) and if lid opens before that, cancel everything.

very clever - is this setup via the acpi default.sh script? Some more details would be
appreciated

thanks

Seconded. Sounds like a really good solution.

[dmpogo]

My scripts is a combination of acpid script, tuxonice and hibernate-scripts. Changes are really minor

My default.sh has

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case "$group" in
        button)
                case $action in
                        power)
                                /sbin/shutdown -h -t 5 now
                                ;;
                        #       xset dpms force off
                        lid)
                                date >> /var/log/lid
                                echo $id >> /var/log/lid
                                echo $value >> /var/log/lid
                                cat /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state >> /var/log/lid
                                /etc/acpi/lidbtn.sh
                                ;;

                        *)      log_unhandled $* ;;
                esac
                ;;

where /etc/acpi/lidbtn.sh is

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#!/bin/bash

lid_state=/proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state

test -e $lid_state || exit 0

if grep -q closed $lid_state ; then
#Often, we shutdown or hibernate and then immediately close lid.
#Try to sleep to let these processes finish
   sleep 30s
# Lid could have been open back during this wait
   if grep -q closed $lid_state ; then
      logger "lid closed -> suspending"
      /usr/sbin/hibernate-s2both
   fi
else
   logger "lid opened -> resuming"
fi

It uses a bit modified script from hibernate-scripts, I have a symlink /usr/sbin/hibernate-s2both

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/usr/sbin/hibernate-s2both -> /usr/sbin/hibernate

and use the property of hibernate scripts, that if you have a symlink with a "suffix", hibernate searches for a configuration file "suffix.conf" in /etc/hibernate directory. In my case it is "s2both.conf". This conf file is just a copy of tuxonice.conf, with one difference

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## Powerdown method - 3 for suspend-to-RAM, 4 for ACPI S4 sleep, 5 for poweroff
PowerdownMethod 3

tuxonice always writes and image to disk, as for hibernation, and now I instruct it after doing it not to hibernate, but suspend-to-RAM



One thing is, script relies on /proc interface which acpid starts to abandon. For now it still seems to work, however, deperetiated proc entries and directories are enabled in my kernel.