My Dell Latitude 110L test box has a really annoying issue: closing the lid and reopening it makes the screen stay blank (without freezing the system).

A wiki about DellLatitude110L and a Dell Latitude 110L & Gentoo Linux article pointed me to a workaround: running vbetool dpms on on the lid ACPI event.

It's solved by creating a /etc/acpi/events/lid file for acpid:

event=button/lid
action=/etc/acpi/actions/lid.sh

and a /etc/acpi/actions/lid.sh script:

#!/bin/sh

if grep -q open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state; then
    /usr/sbin/vbetool dpms on
else
    /usr/sbin/vbetool dpms off
fi

Some Ubuntu bug reports suggest it is a BIOS issue:

• closing my laptop lid at the gdm prompt doesn't work normally
• closing laptop lid during boot stops X from appearing

So, I created a DOS boot disk with freedos to apply the BIOS update. Unfortunately, the BIOS update program complained that it cannot run in a protected environment.

A french blog entry pointed me to Dell's biosdisk project. A simple biosdisk mkfloppy -d /dev/fd0 L110LA08.EXE created the bootdisk, which worked and upgraded the BIOS flawlessly.

Unfortuntely, it didn't fix my screen blanking issue, so I'll stick to my acpid hacks. Maybe we can find a proper way to integrate them in the distro...