These things happen in predictable patterns. Due to hardware issues I land in Fedora, and after six months it's time for something else.

Not that Fedora 18 and now 19 haven't been great, because they have.

But I'm wary of my AMD APU-based HP laptop's trouble with suspend/resume and 3D acceleration. I had both working for a very short time during the AMD Catalyst 13.6 beta's brief run.

But before that I had neither, and now I have decent 3D with AMD Catalyst but seemingly no hope of working suspend/resume with this AMD A4-4300M APU and its AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics.

And I'm getting tired of new kernels coming into Fedora, some with Catalyst support, some without. And it's past time that this AMD GPU (I think it's the Trinity family) get better support from the kernel and the free and proprietary drivers.

What I'm saying is that if the hardware support I need is not going to come soon, I'd like something more stable while I'm waiting.

So I started auditioning new Linux distributions yesterday.

And when Debian 7.1 and 7.2 Live DVDs both allowed me to successfully suspend/resume my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop, I was firmly pulled back into the Debian camp. To my "home" distro.

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I thought you could take care of turning off suspend when the laptop lid is shut under GNOME 3 by using GNOME Tweak Tool. That doesn't work.

Automatic suspend when the lid is closed doesn't work for me because suspend/resume doesn't function on my HP hardware, and I'd like to close the damn lid every once in awhile without having to do a hard boot afterward.

It's the little things.

So I dug in a bit and found out in the Fedora Forum what you have to do (thanks to forum poster jvroig):

In a terminal:

su -
cd /etc/systemd/
gedit logind.conf

Once you're in logind.conf, uncomment (i.e. remove the #) on this line:

#HandleLidSwitch=suspend

Then change "suspend" to "lock"

It should now read like this:

HandleLidSwitch=lock

Save and close the logind.conf file.

Once you reboot, closing the lid should lock the screen and not suspend the laptop.

Note: Xfce doesn't suffer from the same inability as GNOME 3 to control what happens when you close the laptop lid.

Alternate instructions if you want to use vi and sudo:

Open a terminal and type:

$ sudo vi /etc/systemd/logind.conf

Change this line:

#HandleLidSwitch=suspend

to this (remove #, replace suspend with lock):

HandleLidSwitch=lock

Save and close the file in vi, then reboot.