How to disable sleep or screen blank when closing laptop lids

This entry was posted by Saturday, 18 September, 2010
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I have an awesome HDMI out on my laptop – works flawlessly on the TV. This is handy for watching movies and plugging into the big screen. problem is that I want to close the laptop lid, and that puts the laptop to sleep!
I’m using Gnome, so this tutorial is specific for that.

First of all, i went into System -> Preferences -> Power Management

This gives me the options of ‘sleep’, ‘shutdown’, or ‘blank’. This is great for the most part, but did not work when playing movies on an external screen with laptop lid. Also if i happened to just want to use an external screen plugged into the laptop for work things it wasnt going to work.
To fix this, i opened up console and typed in

gconf-editor

This brings up the power editor of gnome, sort of like windows registry edit.
I clicked on apps -> gnome-power-manager -> buttons
In here i found the one which was lid_ac – this means its the lid when the laptop is plugged into the AC. I right clicked on that, then clicked “Edit Key”. Changed the Value to be ‘nothing’ (the actual word nothing).
Bingo, this is now done. You can tweak other settings in here, when you click on them normally it has a description of what they do and what options work.
I would advise against deleting anything!


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