When a laptop lid is getting closed, different scenarios are possible: do nothing, blank screen, suspend or shutdown.
In Linux Mint, the system behavior on closing the lid is controlled by the “Power Management” and “Screensaver” settings.
This note shows how to enable or disable screen locking when closing the lid in Linux Mint.
Cool Tip: How to split a screen in Linux Mint with keyboard shortcuts! Read more →
Lock Screen on Lid Close in Linux Mint
Follow these steps to enable or disable screen locking on lid close in Linux Mint:
- Open the “Mint Menu” and search for the “Power Management”.
- In each of the “On AC Power” and “On Battery Power” tabs, in the “When laptop lid is closed” behavior, select the “Blank screen”:
- Open the “Mint Menu” again and search for the “Screensaver”.
- Depending on if you want to enable or disable the screen locking when the laptop lid is closed, check or uncheck the “Lock screen when screensaver is active” checkbox:
weird – this article does not seem to be too old. maybe it just does not apply to xfce edition, as there is no “power management” just “power manager” with different options.
This solution only applies to the logged in user. If no user is logged in the lidclosed action still suspends the computer. A more useful answer would provide a solution for completely disabling any lidclosed action under all possible circumstances.
Problem
I disabled the lid close action in power settings as a user.
Then discovered that when the user is not logged in, the lid closed action still suspended the computer.
Aside
This was because I set up RDP to the linux computer and wanted it closed, however XRDP doesn’t allow a remote computer to ‘grab’ the existing session so the source computer has to be logged out to start with. I tried closing the source computer’s lid _after_ logging in via RDP and the system still suspended itself. This implies that xrdp is actually logged in and proxying the login that I use from the remote system. Slightly irrelevant but it does explain the results that occurred.
See Also
Solution
So to fix that on a MINT system using systemd one of the configuration files needs to be modified.
as root, edit the file /etc/systemd/logind.conf.
Change the line #HandleLidSwitch=suspend to HandleLidSwitch=ignore
Change the line #LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited=yes to LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited=yes
Thanks for sharing!