So, I wanted to watch some video on an external monitor connected to my Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala laptop, but everytime I closed the laptop’s lid, the external monitor would turn off. This is when I noticed the option of Do nothing in Power Management was noticeably absent.

The only choices available under On AC Power > When laptop lid is closed were Blank screen, Suspend, Hibernate, and Shutdown, all of which aren’t acceptable choices. Currently set at Blank screen, it would blank both screens, laptop and external, which was defeating the purpose. Since my laptop turns its own screen off when the lid is closed, I don’t need Ubuntu doing it for me.

After some digging, I came across this Launchpad bug explaining the same condition. Lars Bengtsson’s comment explained with a link that there was a change in the gnome-power-manager package back in July that decided to hide the Do nothing option unless it was specified in GConf.

There are two ways to specify Do nothing in GConf. Pick what you’re more comfortable with. The GUI way is to press ALT-F2 and run gconf-editor. Use the tree to navigate to apps > gnome-power-manager > buttons > lid_ac and change it to nothing. The Long description that appears below in the Key Documentation area provides the other possible values.

GConf lid_ac value

From a command line, or in a terminal window, use the following command to change the value to nothing:

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/gnome-power-manager/buttons/lid_ac "nothing"

You should now see Do nothing as an option from within the Power Management application.

Power Management: Do nothing now available

It’s only semi-persistent. Once you change the option to something else, Do nothing is hidden again. You’ll need to repeat the process to add it back. Some comments from the bug entry suggest this may not work for everyone. I suspect there are other issues preventing them from keeping an external monitor active with a laptop’s lid closed which I couldn’t suggest a reason.

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