Asus L210MA lid screen issue with XFCE4 on Debian 12

This is a series of note where I try to fix a lid issue I had originally on Devuan, however I decided to troubleshoot on Debian first…

My beloved crapbook, which does honestly its job, has having a lot of issues when you close and open the lid, it may happen anything, although the most common cases are:

• Frozen screen but mouse working; caps-lock led working; TTYs working so you can restart the login manager with:

sudo service lightdm --full-restart

• Black and white striped screen; totally frozen; caps-lock led not working; in this case you have to force a reboot with the sysrec magic recovery combo:

alt + printscreen r e i s u b

Best workaround found

I tested several combinations and followed various ancient and modern workarounds, none of those worked out; eventually I found my recipe, perhaps many steps are even unnecessary, however this combination seems to have the highest rate of reliability.

1. Turn on or reboot the laptop, go to into bios, F7 and disable "wake on lid open" voice

=> Asus bios screenshot

2. Uninstall the Intel driver i915

sudo apt purge xserver-xorg-video-intel

3. Go on XFCE Power Manager settings using these settings for both "Battery" and "Plugged in"

=> System Tab Settings | Display Tab Settings

4. Let Logind handling power lid event with this terminal command:

xfconf-query -c xfce4-power-manager -p /xfce4-power-manager/logind-handle-lid-switch -n -t bool -s true

=> Source

This setting seems to be forgotten, create an entry in "session and startup"

=> Session entry details

5. Modifying on "/etc/elogind/logind.conf" the following lines as it is shown:

HandleLidSwitch=ignore
HandleLidSwitchExternalPower=ignore
HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore
LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited=no

it is a good idea make a backup before

6. Restart the laptop, login again, close the lid, wait for 5 minutes, cross the fingers… 🤞

7. Can you read the seventh point?

If you were able to read also the last point it means the workaround made its dirty jobs, and you and I can continue to use the crapbook as any other else!

Peace! 🙏

Wrapping this up

I am going to use Debian with this workaround for another full week, although my scope is to come to Devuan. I hope this workaround will work also with Devuan plus runit… 🙏

For comments or suggestion write me at:

=> freezr AT disroot DOT org

=> ↩ go back