Results tagged “ACPI” from CLICK

My initial elation with Ubuntu 8.04's ability to Suspend/Resume the Gateway Solo 1450 has given way to doubt.

First of all, Suspend/Resume doesn't work all of the time. I've had a few situations where I lose keyboard and mouse/touchpad functionality.

And ... in a very-much-related matter, sometimes the keyboard and mouse or touchpad die for no particular reason.

So the Suspend/Resume problem might be related to the keyboard/mouse issue.

At any rate, I need more reliability, especially because my wife and daughter are using this laptop more and more.

Why? Well, the 4-year-old has all her educational games on here, and Ilene's now-5-year-old iBook G4 is starting to die. It gets really hot and shuts down after a period of use. I think it's the CPU fan, but I have to get my hands on the laptop. First I'll have to find an app that lets me monitor CPU temperature and fan speed on this PowerPC-equipped machine. Then I have to crack the case and get a visual on the fan to see whether or not it's, in fact, spinning at all.

Back to Ubuntu 8.04. I will try to track down what's making the keyboard and mouse fail. It could be that whatever in ACPI that allows Suspend/Resume to work is causing the problem. I'd bet on that.

In Debian Lenny, I don't have Suspend/Resume, and closing the laptop lid leads to a crash (I might have that one fixed, however). But there are no random crashes of X or the box itself. Yep, Debian continues to be rock-solidly reliable. In times of Ubuntu-esq trouble, I always turn to Debian, and I've been running it pretty continuously since Etch came out in April 2007.

I never had a problem on the $0 Laptop with the Slackware 11-based Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0, either. Something to think about.

I'm always using a mix of machines and OSes for my work, but until this week, my main "home" machine -- The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) -- has been mostly used at home for a bit of Web browsing, testing Linux distributions, and my daughter's favorite educational games (gCompris, Childsplay, TuxPaint, Potato Guy).

But this week I've needed to use the laptop a lot more, while I'm in the office.

We're testing a new blog server, so I'm using my main computer (the Dell Pentium 4 box with Windows XP) to work on the new server, with the $0 Laptop and Debian Lenny for the old server). It's just easier to keep two computers running, given the situation.

I often use my test box at the office, but despite remarkably similar specs (VIA 1 GHz C3 processor in the test box vs. Celeron 1.3 GHz in the laptop), the Gateway computes circles around the VIA box, a converted thin client hobbled by less-than-optimal graphics and sound chips.

Anyway, I'm using the Gateway with Lenny -- and while still the Testing distribution of Debian, Lenny has been running very well on my various computers.

I've been using the Epiphany browser very heavily. I can just as easily use Iceweasel (aka Firefox), but I've grown used to Epiphany. The one thing I miss is the built-in spell-checker of Firefox.

I'm divided on the way Epiphany handles bookmarks. The browser encourages the user to categorize every bookmark, even in multiple ways. So I have categories for BSD, Linux, Debian, etc. The bookmarks themselves are arranged alphabetically, not in the order that they were created.

That's both good and bad. On the one hand, it's easy to find things when they're alphabetical, assuming you've given them an appropriate name (or accepted the one provided by the Web site in question). I'd like a feature by which the most used bookmarks float to the top, but with categorization, it's easy to slice up a bunch of bookmarks into manageable chunks.

For photo editing, I haven't needed to preserve Photoshop-style captions lately, so I've been using MtPaint. I don't remember it being in the repositories for Etch, but I'm sure glad it's there for Lenny. Not that grabbing and installing the .deb package was difficult, because it wasn't, but it's nice to see the package easily available to all. There's a lot to be said for a quick-loading, quick-working image editor for small jobs.

But there's a bit of a gap for me in all of this. I use Linux and recently OpenBSD a lot. But not exclusively. I spend quite a bit of time fighting with XP. Yep, I was pretty happy with it when I first got my Dell box at the office. Even in 512 MB of RAM, the thing was fast. I could open tons of programs, a dozen or more Firefox windows, IE6 wasn't that bad, etc.

But a few years down the road -- and I don't have administrative access to the box, so I can't really fix anything -- the thing slows down to a sludgy crawl halfway through the day. And don't get me started on IE7. I waited over a year after it was released to "upgrade," and to gain tabbed browsing (which I already had with Firefox, my preferred browser in Windows) I had to lose speed and GUI FTP functionality (which I've retained with the windows file interface itself).

Anyway, I'm hammering away in Debian Lenny right now, and I can pretty much say that it does what I need it to do.

While I have my CPU fan under control in pretty much every Linux kernel I've run, I'd love to take the next step and get suspend/resume working. Right now ACPI isn't perfect on this Gateway laptop. Closing the lid, in Debian at least, causes a crash. It doesn't in Puppy Linux, but does in Debian Lenny.

I should probably make that my next project -- getting deeper into ACPI. With suspend/resume working, this laptop would throw off a lot less heat during times I wasn't using it ... which truth be told has been very little time of late.

Even though I did an OpenBSD install on my free primary partition on this laptop, I'm probably going to move on. I want to roll OpenSuse 10.3 onto it before I try out Ubuntu 8.04. My live CD foray with the 8.04 beta on the Gateway didn't go very well, and I'm having ACPI issues with it on my text box as well (a first for Ubuntu; but I saw similar things with Xubuntu).

I have a net install disc for OpenSuse 10.3, but I also picked up a full DVD of the distro at SCALE 6X, and that's what I might try out, possibly this weekend if I get time. The prospect of the new HP Mini-Note, which will be preloaded with Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop has me in a Novell-friendly frame of mind, despite the company's previous intellectual-property deal with Microsoft.

So I'll give OpenSuse a roll before Ubuntu 8.04 goes into release. ... I'm nowhere near getting ACPI working properly in OpenBSD 4.3. I'll wait for a live CD of 4.3 -- should appear sometime soon after the official May release -- and experiment with that.

OpenBSD 4.3 is being released on May 1, 2008, but if you pre-ordered the CDs, they're already being shipped. Another good reason to order the CDs. Yeah, I know it's $50, and we're accustomed to getting everything for free ... but it's nice to support the project.

I've been keeping an eye on the OpenBSD Journal, and this entry has some of the editors of the site (http://undeadly.org -- who doesn't love that URL?) were discussing the new features. If this works, it'll be a pig-in-shit-happy moment for me (emphasis mine):

Johan M:son Lindman (johan), on ACPI:

ACPI is as of the 4.3 release turned on by default. This means that a fair amount of newer computers that would previously require manual configuring by means of UKC or config will now "just work". As with most large changes acpi(4) is still a tad rough around the edges but the fundamental pieces are in and this should make it easier for developers to further extend and add features to it. One much anticipated feature will be suspend/wake, it is not yet working so a lot of OpenBSD laptop users will be looking forward to this being added in the future.

I would love suspend/wake, but what I would really love is my CPU fan to be under ACPI control. I have a feeling I could make it happen, but I'm not yet worthy.

(Thanks to Paul de Weerd for the picture of his OpenBSD CDs and packaging)