Comment 3 for bug 138102

xorg.conf is not relevant here, this is a gnome-power-manager bug, not an X bug. This bug is completely reproducible on Ubuntu 8.04, so I'm reopening this report and marking it confirmed.

I'll try to explain in my own terms what I'm seeing, which I recognize as reflected in TJ's description so I'm sure it's the same issue.

I have gnome-power-manager configured to blank the screen when the laptop lid is closed on AC power; I furthermore have gnome-screensaver set up to require a password to unlock the screen.

When I'm using my laptop on its own and I close the lid, the screensaver correctly activates and the screen is locked, so that when I open the lid I have to enter a password to get access. This is good.

I recently purchased an LCD which I've started using via my laptop's VGA output. My chipset is fully supported by xrandr, and the display is automatically detected by xrandr --auto, the desktop is automatically resized to use the larger resolution of the LCD, and the same windows are shown on both displays via clone mode. This is also good.

Because of the current disposition of my desk (i.e. - cluttered), I then proceed to close up my laptop, using only the external monitor, and external keyboard/mouse.

The screensaver then engages, because I've closed the lid. While superficially correct, this is no longer good, because it means I have to unlock my screen immediately afterwards to continue using my laptop.

I believe the correct behavior here would be for gnome-power-manager to detect that an additional screen is present, and to *not* trigger the screensaver on lid close events when this is the case. Enabling the screensaver if the external display is subsequently disconnected (which I think should be detectable in the xrandr case, possibly not in the nvidia case since nvidia doesn't use xrandr) would be ok, but logically, the reason I want the screen to lock when I close my lid is that I've put the machine into a state that I'm definitively not using it - I can't reach the keyboard and I can't see the screen. When an external monitor is attached, this is no longer the case, and gnome-power-manager should be made clever enough to account for this.