Closing laptop lid does not lock screen on Void Linux

Void Linux is an amazing operating system which reminded me FreeBSD in Linux world. Many parts were built from scratch, like runit for init scripts, xbps for package management. And they are minimalistic which makes it even better. Void uses rolling release to delivers fresh packages on regular basis.

It works quite well on my old MacBook Air 2011. It required a few hacks, especially for TouchPad, though.

But there was one small issue that bothered me for quite some time. When I closed a laptop’s lid, Void went to sleep (by default sleep-to-ram mode). Yet when I opened the lid back, the screen was not locked.

I could wait for a screensaver to lock the screen after 5 minutes of idle, before closing the lid. Not ideal, but it was usable.

Recently I looked a bit more into this issue. Apparently such events like lid closed, lid opened, power button pressed are handled by acpid daemon. It stands for Advanced Configuration and Power Interface even daemon. Check man 8 acpid for more details.

In Linux, including Void, it is usually hooked to /etc/acpi/events/*. The default distribution catches all events:

$ cat /etc/acpi/events/anything 
# Pass all events to our one handler script
event=.*
action=/etc/acpi/handler.sh %e

These events are handled by /etc/acpi/handler.sh in Void Linux. The part to handle laptop’s lid:

case "$1" in
#...
    button/lid)
        case "$3" in
                close)
                        # suspend-to-ram
                        logger "LID closed, suspending..."
                        zzz
                        ;;
                open) logger "LID opened" ;;
                *) logger "ACPI action undefined (LID): $2";;
        esac
        ;;
esac

The close lid event is passed as handler.sh button/lid LID0 close to this script. Which triggers suspend command zzz. zzz does not give any details about locking the screen, and I guess it should not.

I use Mate desktop. In Mate you could lock the screen with command mate-screensaver-command -l.

It means that with a small modification to /etc/acpi/handler.sh I could probably force Mate to lock the screen. Just add sudo -u $USER mate-screensaver-command -l to this file before zzz:

case "$1" in
#...
    button/lid)
        case "$3" in
                close)
                        # suspend-to-ram
                        logger "LID closed, suspending..."
+                       sudo -u $USER mate-screensaver-command  -l
                        zzz
                        ;;
                open) logger "LID opened" ;;
                *) logger "ACPI action undefined (LID): $2";;
        esac
        ;;
esac

Note that it is required to run this command as an actual user.

It is possible to improve it further by checking $DESKTOP_SESSION env variable to determine which desktop is used.