Screen does not turn back on when closing lid on dell latitude D610

[Hein-PietervanBraam]

I just had this problem on my freshly installed edgy machine, this did not happen on my dapper > edgy machine:

When closing the laptop lid, the screen blanks and turns off, when reopening the lid, the screen does not turn on again, and I have to manually issue "vbetool dpms on"

gnome-power-manager also does not respect the 'when lid is closed' 'do nothing' setting in gnome-power-preferences.

I believe the bug comes because the hardware shuts down the screen, but for some reason does not turn it back on again.

There does not appear to be a workaround right now.

[Hein-PietervanBraam (hp)]

Actually, there is:

if I edit /etc/acpi/lid.sh and comment out the policy check, and add
vbetool dpms on
at the end of the else block, it all works as expected.

[Jordan (jordan-9111)]

Im also have the same prob here and im using Dell XPS M1210.
After i close the lid, the backlight is off.
Once i open back the lid, i cant see anything but can heard the sound from the laptop.
I did double check with the setting, it is remain when lid is close, laptop do nothing.

[Daniel Bermudez G. (nergar)]

Many people is having this problem mainly with Dell laptops

[Daniel Bermudez G. (nergar)]

This is really annoying and a show stopper, I hope something can be done to fix this

[Leonard Broman (firepiper)]

On hardy alpha6 this works perfectly.

[evolipel (mlepilov)]

As has been noted before, this problem seems to affect many Dell laptops. I'm surprised it hasn't been fixed yet, seeing as how it's fairly noticeable.

Anyway, I fixed it by following

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=358432

which is pretty much the same advice. Specifically, what I've done is I've placed

#!/bin/sh
grep -q open /proc/acpi/button/lid/*/state
if [ $? = 0 ]
then
    # lid is open; turn the screen on
    vbetool dpms on
fi

before

if [ `CheckPolicy` == 0 ]; then exit; fi

seeing as how the script never actually gets past this policy check (even if g-p-m is set to "Do Nothing" on lid events, as is noted in the original report).

The issue seems to be that there's something on Dell laptops that makes a screen go off regardless of any OS-specific settings (e.g. closing the lid during the grub menu makes it turn off also). That wouldn't be bad if xset was able to bring it back on, which is what lid.sh does; however, it doesn't seem to be able to, and the only way is to use vbetool.

I'm running a Dell Inspiron 8100 with an nvidia GeForce2 Go and the proprietary nvidia driver (although this particular issue has nothing to do with the video card or the driver as far as I'm concerned).

Also, the following bugs seem to be related:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi/+bug/49521
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/44393
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/22987

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the report Hein-PietervanBraam , It has been a long time without any comment or a duplicate in this bug report and It is possible that the bug has been fixed. May you please try to reproduce it with the latest Stable Release of Ubuntu the Natty Narwhal and add the respective comments to the report? You can learn how to get that release at http://www.ubuntu.com/download . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.