unix laptop question: closing the lid

[Chuck Yerkes]

Quoting Robert Hajime Lanning (lanning at monsoonwind.com):
> I have a Thinkpad 600X.  There is an option to not have the lid do anything.

Are there heat implications to this?

I used to have a Vaio 14" laptop (terrible support for anything,
tho FreeBSD was stable - tho without support for the modem,
firewire, or sound and X ran only with a native Linux driver
at the time).

One week it decided that it would no longer sleep on close.
I learned this with a very warm laptop bag and near dead
batteries as I got onto a plane.  Rather than really chasing
down the problem, I turned it into a Mac and my life was
better.

But the Vaio in this state seemed warm and I wondered if the design
presumed some airflow from the vents and keyboard above.