I have an Acer Aspire E5-571G laptop that I want to use with the lid closed. Ideally I would want to power it off and boot it without opening the lid, but I dismissed that idea. In any case I would like to suspend and wake the machine with a closed lid.
I have connected the laptop via HDMI to an external display and have a Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard that I use via a Unifying receiver. I am running the latest PopOS 21.10 on Linux Kernel 5.15.8.
With the lid open my setup works fine. I can suspend the machine and wake it with my keyboard.
Closing the lid prevents waking from sleep. When I press a key on my external keyboard, the LED on the laptop briefly flashes blue (indicating a wake), but quickly goes back to orange (indicating a suspended state). This makes me think that using an external keyboard is not the problem, especially since waking with the lid open works fine. Wedging a piece of cardboard into the closed laptop and moving that over a key to wake it results in the LED rapidly flashing orange, without waking the laptop.
My guess is that there is some hardware switch that prevents a wake when the lid is closed. I could not find any information on this (English is not my first language, so using the right search terms is difficult), and I am not experienced with hardware, so I did not try to open the laptop looking for a "switch".
How can I wake my laptop with the lid closed?
I would prefer a software solution, but I am willing to do (easy) hardware modifications if someone knows any details about this.