Supressing Suspend-Mode on Dell-Laptops with Ubuntu

Anoth­er ques­tion that I unfor­tu­nate­ly had to answer myself sev­er­al times, because I am so for­get­ful: How can I reli­ably pre­vent my Dell Lap­top with Ubun­tu from going into sus­pend mode when the lid is closed? I need that fea­ture because my devices use the same Dell screen with …

Switch­ing from one machine to the oth­er is done via a sig­nal. But a com­put­er in sus­pend mode would – sur­prise, sur­prise – not receive the “it’s your turn”-message.

To solve that issue, we tra­di­tion­al­ly would mod­i­fy the GNOME set­tings under Settings/Power to

• Mode = Balanced
• Power Saver = off
• Screen Blank = Never
• Automatic Suspend = off

But — unfor­tu­nate­ly — that does not work on DELL lap­tops with Ubun­tu. Instead, we must use ‘the’ Dell-spe­cif­ic method:

Solution

• > sudo systemctl restart systemd-logind .
• > sudo systemctl unmask sleep.target suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target
• > sudo vi /etc/systemd/logind.conf
• Replace #HandleLidSwitch=suspend by HandleLidSwitch=ignore to do nothing
• Save the file