Chrome

How To Prevent Your Chromebook From Going To Sleep

CrOS no sleep for youThere are some cases where you wish your chromeOS, Chromebook (or Chromebox) will not to enter into sleep mode. A quick example is when you wish to use it in a conference to present a cool web experiment and you don’t want it to vanish after few minutes. Here are two quick ways to achieve it. Both are a bit of a hack… but it’s not a complicated process.

The hacker way

  1. Login with the admin user.
  2. Open a terminal by hiting CTRL+ALT+T
  3. Type the following
    1. shell (to drop into a standard bash shell)
    2. sudo stop powerm – to disable sleep when lid is closed. You could go with the longer version of: sudo initctl stop powerm but there is no reason to type more…
    3. sudo stop powerd – to disable all other power management features.
  4. Now logout from the menu – But do not restart! Why? because these settings won’t survive it.

The easy way

Install this Chrome extension – Caffeine after your clone/fork it from Github. It is an experimental extension for Google ChromeBooks that overrides the default power settings.
It is using this API:

chrome.experimental.power.requestKeepAwake()

which is still under experiment so you will need to enable it before the installation.

How to install:

  1. Go to about:flags on your Chromebook, enable “Experimental Extension APIs” and then restart your Chromebook.
  2. Go to extensions, toggle on Developer Mode, and click load unpacked extension.
  3. Choose the folder containing this source.
  4. Toggle / unToggle the menu icon to keep Chrome awake. Is it easy or what?

Happy new year!

[Update Sep 2014] – You can now have Keep Aware extension from the Chrome Web Store. This is the easiest way and it got two option: full system awake (sun is up) or display will go to sleep but network and the rest will continue to work (moon is up).

Standard

9 thoughts on “How To Prevent Your Chromebook From Going To Sleep”

  1. Ryan says:

    I can’t get my acer to open the files once I hve them downloaded. I can highlight them on the menu after selecting “load unpacked extension”, but “open” is unclickable.

    • greenido says:

      Are you in ‘developer mode’?
      It’s in the ‘top-right’ corner of chrome://extensions page.

      • rhys says:

        Yes i am. The Hacker Way does not work either apparently the shell command doesn’t exist (nor does sudo)

  3. rhys says:

    Just to check, i am download the Caffinev2.zip file keeping it in downloads? also i have checked dev mode is turned on in extensions and i have allowed the external API’s, i am using a Samsung Arctic white 3G. i am running the stable version of the software (25). as i said None of the suggested terminal commands are working.

  4. Martyn says:

    Hi,

    Any idea how to revert the changes?
    I used the first method and although it achieved the desired result at the time I now would like my Chromebook to sleep when I close the lid so that the battery is conserved.

    • greenido says:

      1. You can always remove this extension.
      2. In case, you used the terminal just type: sudo start powerd and the power management features will come back to life.

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