Daniel Lange's blog

Xfce 4.12 as default in Ubuntu/Xubuntu 18.04 LTS did not suspend a laptop after closing the lid. In fact running xfce4-power-manager --quit ; xfce4-power-manager --no-daemon --debug showed that xfce4 wasn't seeing a laptop lid close event at all.

To the contrary acpi_listen nicely finds button/lid LID close and button/lid LID open events when folding the screen and opening it up again.

As so often the wonderful docs / community of Arch Linux to the rescue. This forum thread from 2015 received the correct answer in 2017:

Xfce4 basically recognizes systemd and thus disables its built-in power-management options for handling these "button events" (but doesn't tell you so in the config UI for power-manager). Systemd is configured to handle these events by default (/etc/systemd/logind.conf has HandleLidSwitch=suspend but for unknown reasons decides not to honor that).

So best is to teach Xfce4 to handle the events again as in pre-systemd times:

xfconf-query -c xfce4-power-manager -p /xfce4-power-manager/logind-handle-lid-switch -s false

Now the UI options will work again as intended and the laptop suspends on lid close and resumes on lid open.

Update:

07.01.19: Changed XFCE -> Xfce as per Corsac's suggestion in the comments below. Thank you!

Background info:

The name "XFCE" was originally an acronym for "XForms Common Environment", but since that time it has been rewritten twice and no longer uses the XForms toolkit. The name survived, but it is no longer capitalized as "XFCE", but rather as "Xfce". The developers' current stance is that the initialism no longer stands for anything specific. After noting this, the FAQ on the Xfce Wiki comments "(suggestion: X Freakin' Cool Environment)".

(quoted from Wikipedia's Xfce article also found in the Xfce docs FAQ).

Ubuntu unfortunately has decided again to implement another "phone home" feature, this time transferring your lsb_release information, CPU model and speed (from /proc/cpuinfo), uptime output, most of uname -a and curl version to a Ubuntu news web-service.

Here is the Launchpad bug report #1637800 introducing this ... web bug.

This thing runs both systemd-timer based (via /lib/systemd/system/motd-news.service and /lib/systemd/system/motd-news.timer) and on request when you log in (via /etc/update-motd.d/50-motd-news).

There has even been a bug filed about the motd advertising HBO's Silicon Valley show.

To prevent this from running (it is enabled by default on Ubuntu 17.04 and may probably propagate down to earlier versions as well), edit /etc/default/motd-news to include

ENABLED=0

so

sed -i "s/ENABLED=1/ENABLED=0/" /etc/default/motd-news # run as root

for your automated installs.

Update:

02.07.2017: Dustin Kirkland responded to a YC "hacker news" mention of his motd spam. He mentions:

You're welcome to propose your own messages for merging, if you have a well formatted, informative message for Ubuntu users.
We'll be happy to review and include them in the future.

What could possibly go wrong?

Netatalk 3.1.9 has been released with two interesting fixes / amendments:

• FIX: afpd: fix "admin group" option
• NEW: afpd: new options "force user" and "force group"

Here are the full release notes for 3.1.9 for your reading pleasure.

Due to upstream now differentiating between SysVinit and systemd packages I've followed that for simplicity's sake and built libgcrypt-only builds. If you need the openssl-based tools continue to use the 3.1.8 openssl build until you have finished your migration to a safer password storage.

Be sure to read the original blog post if you are new to Netatalk3 on Debian Jessie! You'll get nowhere if you install the .debs below and don't know about the upgrade path. So RTFA.

Now with that out of the way: