So I started getting this annoying problem with my laptop. The battery was always dead when I was about to use the computer. Weird I thought. Maybe the battery had gone bad… Anyways. Plugged the charger in and moved on with my day.

Later that day I shut the lid, put the laptop in my laptop case and put it in my bag. Went home, pick my laptop out of the bag and it was damn hot… The fans were on full blast.

Something ain’t right. I now realised that the suspend feature probably does not work for some reason…

Troubleshooting

First I asked myself a few questions that needed to be answered:

• Can I manually suspend the computer through the terminal?
• Does the computer detect the lid close?

Manual suspend

systemctl suspend

Yes! It works…

Lid close event

$ sudo journalctl
systemd-logind[1127]: Lid closed.
systemd-logind[1127]: Lid opened.

The laptop seem to detect the lid being closed and opened. Good… Then what is wrong with my computer…

The solution according to the internet: /etc/systemd/logind.conf

After countless googling sessions each and every solution mentioned that you need to modify the logind.conf. I uncommented the mentioned lines:

HandleLidSwitch=suspend
HandleLidSwitchDocked=suspend
LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited=yes

Restarted the laptop. Shut the lid and the computer did not go to sleep. What?!?

Ubuntu bug #1799038

After googling some more I found a bug on the ubuntu bug tracker that looked extactly like mine: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/1799038.

The only thing that was different was that this bug targeted Ubuntu 18.10. I was using Ubuntu 18.04…

Updating to Ubuntu 18.10

I opted to update my machine to 18.10.

$ sudo apt update 
$ sudo apt upgrade
$ sudo apt dist-upgrade

Set Prompt=normal in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades.

$ sudo do-release-upgrade

The 18.10 installation broke i3-gaps. Disabled i3-gaps for now and closed the laptop lid. Fans still on…

Live with it or reinstall

I was very close to reinstalling the whole OS now…

The last thing I checked was the system inhibitation locks. The man page says the following:

$ man systemd-inhibit
 Inhibitor locks may be used to block or delay system sleep and shutdown
 requests from the user, as well as automatic idle handling of the OS.
 This is useful to avoid system suspends while an optical disc is being
 recorded, or similar operations that should not be interrupted.

Hmm this looks promising. Maybe something is blocking the system sleep… Let’s check:

 $ systemd-inhibit --list
     Who: xfce4-power-manager (UID 1000/user, PID 3344/xfce4-power-man)
    What: handle-power-key:handle-suspend-key:handle-hibernate-key:handle-lid-switch
     Why: xfce4-power-manager handles these events
    Mode: block

     Who: Unattended Upgrades Shutdown (UID 0/root, PID 1649/unattended-upgr)
    What: shutdown
     Why: Stop ongoing upgrades or perform upgrades before shutdown
    Mode: delay

     Who: ModemManager (UID 0/root, PID 1248/ModemManager)
    What: sleep
     Why: ModemManager needs to reset devices
    Mode: delay

     Who: UPower (UID 0/root, PID 2982/upowerd)
    What: sleep
     Why: Pause device polling
    Mode: delay

     Who: NetworkManager (UID 0/root, PID 1100/NetworkManager)
    What: sleep
     Why: NetworkManager needs to turn off networks
    Mode: delay

Looks like xfce4-power-manager is blocking the suspend/hibernate key and the lid switch.

I think I’ve finally found the problem!!! I googled: xfce4-power-manager lid close and found this topic on the askubuntu forum.

• The accepted answer did not work. (sudo apt-get install pm-utils)

Looking further down I found a answer by Joce.

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

Restarted the computer, shut the lid. The computer went to sleep! Finally!!!