I hadn't bothered to get involved in the HAL, DBus and ACPI wars up to now, and thank goodness.

Previously, when I wanted to suspend my laptop on lid-close I wrote a small script that was called on ACPI event button.lid and used the pm-utils command "pm-suspend" to enter suspend mode.

I guess we are all using DBus now, so I should change to doing things properly. That is, if I could find the docs.

The Slackware wiki has some notes on hibernate, but not suspend, and those notes refer to a UPower key UPower.Hibernate, which AFAICT is not configured on 14.0, so I can't use it as an example to write my own UPower.Suspend.

What is the canonical way in 14.0 to enter suspend mode when a laptop's lid is closed?

I should add I use a tiling WM, so no desktop and no KDE or Gnome power management daemons are running.

There is no Canonical (sic!) way. You are in control and you choose, which way works best for you.

@padeen - I can only answer for XFCE. It's not too hard. From the Menu, choose "Settings", "Power manager". This will open up a window called "Xfce Power Manager". This window has 4 tabs on the left - General, ON AC, ON Battery, Extended. Choose "On AC" and pick your setting for the lid. Now choose "On battery". And again you will see a separate action you can take for the lid close.

Just because it is present it doesn't mean that you have to use it. There is nothing wrong with pm-suspend, if you are used to it then use it.

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Personally, I use your method as it works for all desktop environments and window managers. It saves doing individual configurations.

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I use pm-suspend. You can use XFCE power manager without Xfce. I'm using Crunchbang which uses Xfce power manager with Openbox.