Hardware: Dell Inspiron 8200, NVidia GeForce 440GO (with 64MB VRAM), 1GB
RAM, BIOS A10 (an update to A11 is available but I haven't installed it
yet).
Any pointers on getting suspend and resume (both to/from RAM and disk)
working with the above hardware and FC2?
I've had this laptop for nearly two years now, and it's proved an
excellent Linux machine -- everything except the winmodem worked out of
the box. But when I first installed Linux on it two years ago I looked
into power management, read about ACPI not being supported yet, and read
about all the hoops you had to jump trough to get APM suspend to work
(patching NVidia drivers, creating a special s2d partition) and thought
to myself "forget it, I'll just wait until the 2.6 kernel comes out".
Well, as of this weekend I am now finally running a 2.6 kernel courtesy
of FC2. The trouble is that because I'd decided to not bother with
suspend until I was running 2.6 it turns out that I've not been paying
attention and now haven't got a clue where to start.
First, I have to admit that I don't really understand the difference
between APM and ACPI. It seems that both are started as services,
although whilst apmd returns OK at boot it seems somewhat silent on its
status:
# service acpid status
acpid (pid 2248) is running...
# service apmd status
#
Do I actually want both running at the same time?
I had read that 2.6 supports suspending to disk, and that it uses swap
space for that and so I ensured that my swap partition is greater than
the size of my RAM + VRAM.
What I guess I'd like ideally would be for both suspend to ram and
suspend to disk to work, for closing and opening the lid of the laptop
to trigger suspending to ram and resuming from ram, and for suspend to
disk to happen automatically when battery level become critically low.
Are these things possible yet, or is ACPI still too flaky? I also seem
to remember people saying that some services don't resume properly
afterwards, such as networking. Is that still the case?
Also, does FC2 automatically go into "laptop" mode when I pull out the
power cord, or do I have to do something manually? (I can't find now
where I read about this, but I believe "laptop" mode is something new in
the 2.6 kernel which preserves battery life by slowing the CPU speed and
reducing disk activity.)
Any pointers welcome ...
TIA.
Best, Darren
--
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D. D. Brierton darren@xxxxxxxxxxx www.dzr-web.com
Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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