Asus L410MA lid screen issue with XFCE4 on Debian 12

Intro

Despite being cheap I decided to buy another Asus laptop from the same family for my little one, also this laptop was purchased as second-hand hardware, even because I was convinced to have definitely resolved all the issues, in the previous tests eventually Devuan worked better than Debian.

Honestly this is the 14" version and while a `lspci diff` shows the differences are very minimal:

[L210MA]
00:17.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Celeron/Pentium Silver Processor I2C 4 (rev 06)

[L410MA]
00:17.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Celeron/Pentium Silver Processor I2C 4 (rev 06)
00:17.1 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Celeron/Pentium Silver Processor I2C 5 (rev 06)

Looks like the motherboards are wired differently therefore what used to work for the 11" laptop didn't work for the 14" model… 😩

However the issues were always the same:

Frozen screen but mouse working; caps-lock led working; TTYs working so you can restart the login manager with:

sudo service lightdm --full-restart

Black and white striped screen; totally frozen; caps-lock led not working; in this case you have to force a reboot with the sysrec magic recovery combo:

alt + printscreen r e i s u b

Best workaround found

As I wrote none of the previous workarounds worked out:

Asus L210MA lid screen issue with XFCE4 on Debian 12

Asus L210MA lid screen issue with XFCE4 on Devuan 5

Eventually I was able to find a third workaround that drove me even crazier than the former two. 😵

1. Turn on or reboot the laptop, go to into bios, F7 and disable "wake on lid open" voice

Asus bios screenshot

2. Uninstall the light-locker package

sudo apt purge light-locker

3. Create this file: /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
	Driver      "Intel"
	Option      "TearFree"        "false"
	Option      "TripleBuffer"    "false"
	Option      "SwapbuffersWait" "false"
EndSection

Suggestions from Arch Wiki Intel Graphics

4. Download and install the xfce4-screensaver package

This package for some reason is still doing back and forth between Sid and Experimental preventing to have it landing on Testing and lastly on Stable…

Debian Bug report logs - #919348

Issues or not, the only way to get this laptop working decently is through that package, below the instruction to download and install it as 'root':

$ wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/x/xfce4-screensaver/xfce4-screensaver_4.18.2-1_amd64.deb

# dpkg -i xfce4-screensaver_4.18.2-1_amd64.deb

There you go!

5. Go on XFCE Power Manager settings using these settings for both "Battery" and "Plugged in"

System Tab Settings

Display Tab Settings

6. Let Logind handle power lid events with this terminal command:

xfconf-query -c xfce4-power-manager -p /xfce4-power-manager/logind-handle-lid-switch -n -t bool -s true

Source

> This setting seems to be forgotten, create an entry in "session and startup"

Session entry details

7. Modifying on "/etc/elogind/logind.conf" the following lines as it is shown:

HandleLidSwitch=ignore
HandleLidSwitchExternalPower=ignore
HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore
LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited=no

> it is a good idea make a backup before

9. This are the setting for the XFCE4-Screensaver application

XFCE4-Scrensaver: screensaver tab

XFCE4-Scrensaver: locker tab

10. Restart the laptop, login again, close the lid, wait for 5 minutes, cross the fingers… 🤞

11. Can you read the eleventh point?

If you were able to read also the last point it means the third workaround made its dirty jobs, and you and I can continue to use the crapbook as any other else!

Peace! 🙏

Wrapping this up

This was totally unexpected, three different methods to have similar hardware working is pretty annoying. Furthermore with the L41MA model the only way to avoid frozen screen/session is through the suspension; another downside is that you need to login as soon as possible otherwise the login scripts won't be triggered and the session will forget about the logind special settins, and if the laptop triggers the screensaver the screen got frozen forcing a reboot.

I have the feeling this wouldn't be happened with Devuan, you can say what you want but since the main difference between Debian and Devuan is systemd, the reason why all this shit on these Asus laptops is mainly because systemd.

For comments or suggestion write me at:

freezr AT disroot DOT org

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