Suspend - elusive, yes; impossible, no

Story: Hibernating a Linux Laptop…FINALLY!Total Replies: 8
Author Content
Steven_Rosenber

Oct 05, 2008
8:33 PM EDT
I've bored the pants off of many of you with my own quest to suspend a laptop. Ubuntu has done it out of the box for the last few builds. Nothing else has.
tracyanne

Oct 05, 2008
10:34 PM EDT
Quoting:Ubuntu has done it out of the box for the last few builds. Nothing else has.


Pardon.
tracyanne

Oct 05, 2008
11:42 PM EDT
Steven, I'm using Mandriva 2008.1 and my partner is using Mandriva 2008.0, and neither of us has any trouble Suspending or Hibenating, and we certainly don't have to use the command line to do so.

My partner just shuts the lid on her machine, the option to do so was set from a GUI called KPowersave.

I've chosen not to allow Hibernate or suspend in that manner, and instead have chosen to do it manually by simply by right mouse clicking on the icon, for KPowersave, in the system try. I don't have to do it this way, it's just that I like to have more control over when it happens.

In fact, I've instllaed Mandriva on lots of different laptops, and the only one I've had a problem with was a brand new bottom of the range Lenovo.

But it has other problems as well, Like if I do enable suspend/hibernate by enabling acpi, it won't recognise the CD/DVD hardware, and so mounting a CD/DVD is impossible, so it's one or the other, and the owner opted for no acpi.

The fact is this particular Lenovo has some weird BIOS, or a buggy BIOS.
DiBosco

Oct 06, 2008
5:41 AM EDT
Mandriva 2008.1 suspends my laptop just fine. It was the first release that cam e anywhere near though. It's a little slower than Windows comes out of suspend to RAM an my work laptop, but way faster than a cold boot. Also, suspend to RAM works well with Linpus on the Acer Aspire One - although that boots from cold so fast it's hardly worth it. :p
rijelkentaurus

Oct 06, 2008
8:53 AM EDT
I have to throw in with 2008.1, works like a charm on my Dell Vostro 1700 and my StinkPad G41.
jsusanka

Oct 06, 2008
9:13 AM EDT
"Ubuntu has done it out of the box for the last few builds."

Have to agree the last three builds I know for fact have worked with hibernating my laptop along with the wireless card being recognized out of the box.

linux is easier than windows but then again I am preaching the choir.
theboomboomcars

Oct 06, 2008
9:18 AM EDT
So all you that have a working suspend do you have a via vn800 chipset on a .26 kernel? My suspend worked with the .24 and older, but I can't for the life of me get it to resume.
rijelkentaurus

Oct 06, 2008
11:03 AM EDT
Not I.
Steven_Rosenber

Oct 06, 2008
1:05 PM EDT
Unfortunately my observations are based on the hardware I have and provide nowhere near a complete picture about which kernels and distributions are better overall at suspend/resume.

The laptop I'm using Ubuntu on (a 2002-era Gateway that has run just about everything) won't suspend in anything but Ubuntu. The problem is that if one Linux distribution will successfully suspend/resume any given hunk of hardware, then it should be possible to do it with, if not every other, then most other distros.

That's the theory, anyway, and what stops me is that I'm pretty much reduced to loading OSes, either as live CDs or doing installs, and seeing if suspend/resume works.

Where I'd like to be is knowing what packages and modules are needed, what configuration files are needed and what should be in them. That would seemingly be enough to make suspend/resume work in any distro.

I did this in Linux with ACPI control of my CPU fan, which happened in the 2.6.18 kernel automatically but needs either a line in rc.local (every other distro but Ubuntu) or a line pointing to a shell script (Ubuntu), with the addition of a couple of modules (fan, thermal) in Puppy Linux.

The information for all of these things should be out there but often is not (or is too hard to find).

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