Asus L210MA lid screen issue with XFCE4 on Devuan 5

💡 This gemlog is an evolution of the one made for Debian 12. I am pretty sure the Devuan version is going to work on Debian as well, however I won't test it again since I am not interested in reinstalling Debian.

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 killall slim
sudo sv restart slim

• 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

⚠️ this workaround requires "xorg-driver-video-intel" installed!

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. Create this file: /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
	Driver      "Intel"
	Option      "TearFree"        "false"
	Option      "TripleBuffer"    "false"
	Option      "SwapbuffersWait" "false"
EndSection

=> Suggestions from Arch Wiki Intel Graphics

3. Uninstall SLIM and install instead LIGHTDM

sudo apt install lightdm

• It will ask to select a login manager: select lightdm and then uninstall slim.

sudo apt remove slim

4. Enable lockscreen feature on Xscreensaver

=> Select "Lock Screen After…"

⚠️ Xscreensaver will take control over the screen afterward

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

=> System Settings Tab

⚠️ Any changes on the "Display Setting Tab" won't work therefore you can ignore it

6. Let Elogind 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

7. 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

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

9. Can you read the ninth 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

Finalizing this workaround required a lot of trials and errors, down to resuming old tricks: there were a time where declaring the correct video driver on Xorg would avoid a lot of headaches; even though today it would be supposed to leave Xorg completely stateless without any configuration.

The final result It is not still ideal, for instance none of the screen power management features works, nor TLP is able to make them working; anyway those are minor issues respect the fact to be unable to close and open lid normally… But at least I can eventually say:

«Mission accomplished!» 👍

For comments or suggestion write me at:

=> freezr AT disroot DOT org

=> ↩ go back