How to stop laptop from going to sleep when lid closed (18.04 LTS Mate)

[Bo Berglund]

On Sun, 19 Apr 2020 17:11:37 +1000, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au>
wrote:

>On Sun, 2020-04-19 at 08:31 +0200, Bo Berglund wrote:
>> The Ubuntu install on the laptop seems not to be able to run in a
>> headless mode 24/7 unless the lid is open. It simply won't stop going
>> into suspend after some time (don't know how long before it suspends,
>> but it is not doing it immediately).
>
>Sounds like there are BIOS-level suspend options set up. Boot into the
>BIOS setup and check that the settings there are not causing the unit
>to suspend.
>
>If the suspend is related to the lid closing, then as an absolute last
>resort you could either disable the lid detector or physically prevent
>the lid closing (and configure the unit to blank but not lock).
>

So I restarted the laptop and entered the bios setup to have a look,
but nowhere is there any mention of a standby/suspend or similar
timeout setting. I cannot find any such item at all.
What I could do, though, is note down the details of my laptop:

So:
Elitebook 8440w (workstation)
BIOS:   68CCU Ver F.22 from 2012-06-11
Serial: CND0480SS1
ProdNo: NU547AV

I had a look at the HP support site to find out if there were some new
BIOS posted, but they have changed their site such that one has to
enter the serial or prodno to get anywhere and both of the numbers
above (read from Bios and the same on the bottom label) resulted in
"item not found"...

Googling further for Bios upgrades I found a non-HP site with
downloads, however the Bios there was F.21, so no improvement over
mine..

I downloaded it anyway...
It is an exe archive but 7zip can open and extract stuff from it.
But it seems like there is a whole lot of programs (exe extensions)
and data files I cannot use on Ubuntu, I guess.
And my original Windows installation on this laptop is scrapped, I
used the SSD for Ubuntu instead.

One note:
I used this machine as my main computer until it crashed 8 years ago
and I got myself a new laptop. The crash was later found to be caused
by a clogged up ventilation channel that caused CPU overheating.
So my wife could use this laptop until about 5 months ago when
Windows7 expired.
During these years it would be docked into an HP dock below her desk
with the lid closed and it never ever suspended like it does now.
The dock had the monitor and keyboard, mouse, network etc attached.

I don't want to physically modify the switch that detects the lid
state....

I just tried to stop it from suspending by attaching a wired network
cable to it, I had used WiFi previously. But no difference...


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden