Disable mouse wake from suspend with systemd service

post, Aug 15, 2020, on Mitja Felicijan's blog

I recently bought ThinkPad X220 just as a joke on eBay to test Linux distributions and play around with things and not destroy my main machine. Little to my knowledge I felt in love with it. Man, they really made awesome machines back then.

After changing disk that came with it to SSD and installing Ubuntu to test if  everything works I noticed that even after a single touch of my external mouse the system would wake up from sleep even though the lid was shut down.

I wouldn't even noticed it if laptop didn't have LED sleep indicator. I already had a bad experience with Linux and it's power management. I had a Dell Inspiron 7537 laptop with a touchscreen and while traveling it decided to wake up and started cooking in my backpack to the point that the digitizer responsible for touch actually glue off and the whole screen got wrecked. So, I am a bit touchy about this.

I went on solution hunting and to my surprise there is no easy way to disable specific devices to perform wake up. Why is this not under the power management  tab in setting is really strange.

After googling for a solution I found this nice article describing the solution that worked for me. The only problem with this solution was that he added his solution to .bashrc and this triggers sudo that asks for a password each time new terminal is opened, which get annoying quickly since I open a lot of terminals all the time.

I followed his instructions and got to solution sudo sh -c "echo 'disabled' > /sys/bus/usb/devices/2-1.1/power/wakeup".

I created a system service file sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/disable-mouse-wakeup.service and removed sudo and replaced sh with /usr/bin/sh and pasted all that in ExecStart.

[Unit]
Description=Disables wakeup on mouse event
After=network.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=0

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=1
User=root
ExecStart=/usr/bin/sh -c "echo 'disabled' > /sys/bus/usb/devices/2-1.1/power/wakeup"

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

After that I enabled, started and checked status of service.

sudo systemctl enable disable-mouse-wakeup.service
sudo systemctl start disable-mouse-wakeup.service
sudo systemctl status disable-mouse-wakeup.service

This will permanently disable that device from wakeing up you computer on boot. If you have many devices you would like to surpress from waking up your machine I would create a shell script and call that instead of direclty doing it in service file.