Results tagged “Suspend/Resume” from CLICK

Every time I write about Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which I've been running on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop since its release in April, I mention that it's the only GNU/Linux distribution I've used that successfully suspends and resume the computer.

And I've made that feature — suspend and resume — the bar over which other distros must jump to "beat" 8.04 on this platform.

Make no mistake, I've "enjoyed" a working suspend/resume capability. But I haven't enjoyed returning to the laptop after a while to find the screen looking normal but the keyboard and mouse completely dead. CTRL-ALT-backspace won't kill X. CTRL-ALT-delete won't reboot the machine. I need to do a hard boot with the power button to get things working again.

I've had X issues in many distros, most severely with Debian Lenny, my preferred distro for this PC, which has serious problems with refreshing the screen, leaving the upper panel in GNOME and many graphical elements of various applications virtually unrecognizable after about a half-hour of use.

I appeared to have a similar X issue in Slackware 12, which I installed only briefly (and too briefly to make a determination, especially since I never got a "perfect" X configuration), but other systems, including CentOS 5, Fedora 9, and Puppy 3.00 had none of these issues.

Nor did Ubuntu 8.04, which automatically wrote an xorg.conf that was much different — being way more spares — than any other I'd seen before. But X performs flawlessly.

Even though suspend/resume works in Ubuntu, I'm now about 80 percent sure my intermittent keyboard/mouse freezesare caused by whatever daemon is responsible for automatically checking whether or not to suspend the system.

I pretty much arrived at this point through the process of elimination with the addition of a little bit of logic. Since no other distro appeared to be freezing like this, and since I only have automatic suspend/resume set on Ubuntu, that seemed to be the most likely cause.

So I went into the GNOME Power Manager utility and turned off the "put the computer to sleep after XX minutes" feature.

Since then, I've had no freezing whatsoever in Ubuntu 8.04. A month from now, I'll be sure.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure out the problem with screen refresh in Debian Lenny. I'm considering wiping it from the laptop and trying another secondary distro, maybe CentOS or Fedora. Even Sidux — a more "tame" version Debian Sid — is something to try just to see if I continue to have the screen issues.

Or I could just stick with Ubuntu 8.04. I'm not thinking about upgrading to 8.10, which not coincidentally is available for download today.

Click that last link to see the major new features in Ubuntu 8.10. I'm very unlikely to need 3G wireless, but if I find that 8.10 supports my Airlink 101 AWLL 3028 USB wireless adapter, I would strongly consider doing the upgrade.

I'm sure all of the Ubuntu mirrors are straining mightily with everybody trying to download the whole 8.10 image or upgrading their current installations. I'll be waiting at least a couple of weeks before I try to download the ISO and burn a live CD. If that loads and then the wireless works out of the box (I won't be holding my breath), I'll go forward.

Otherwise, I'll stick with 8.04 LTS — the long-term-support edition of Ubuntu that will be supported until 2011 on the desktop.

But with suspend/resume off the table, Ubuntu has lost its edge over every other GNU/Linux distribution (and even FreeBSD/PC-BSD) on this laptop.

I've been sticking with my installs much longer than usual — I'm still using a now-year-old installation of OpenBSD 4.2 on my $15 Laptop (and OpenBSD 4.4 will be released on Nov. 1).

See tomorrow's post for a breakdown on what I'm running on every machine.

I've talked for some time about the ghosting I get on the upper panel and in portions of Iceweasel/Firefox when using GNOME and Xfce in Debian Lenny.

All I have to do to make the problem go away is boot with the Xfce or Fluxbox window managers. It also doesn't happen with Debian Etch, an install of which I did yesterday. OK, I've seen the problem in Xfce, too ... and it seems related to X refresh.

So it's very possible that the problem I'm having isn't X- or driver-related, but something deep in the heart of GNOME.

I don't know if I'm the only one experiencing this problem, but I haven't been able to find any other reference to the problem, most likely because I'm not describing it in anywhere near the same way as anybody else.

A bunch of Xorg packages flowed into Lenny today, and I installed them. I'm still seeing some funky graphics in my "forward" arrow in Iceweasel, and sometime the little Web icon next to the Web page's name goes all green and opaque on me.

The problem with Iceweasel goes away if I drag the window so a portion goes off the screen. When it refreshes, all is well. The same happens when I mouse over icons in the upper GNOME panel. Of course it's hard to drag the upper GNOME panel off the screen, so areas with no icons or menus tend to stay funky.

So the problem has something to do with screen refresh. Perhaps an xorg.conf tweak will help me? Could the problem be somehow related to Iceweasel? (I've started running Epiphany to see how that affects the system.) I have no idea.

All I know is that I don't have the problem in Ubuntu, in Debian Etch, or in any other distro on this very same hardware.

And while I'm on the subject, compare /etc/X11/xorg.conf in Ubuntu Hardy with the same file on a Debian install. They look very, very different. Ubuntu's is much shorter. Autoconfiguration — or different apps/files — must be taking care of a whole lot more, given the short xorg.conf in Ubuntu.

I'm about to do a second install of Lenny on a free partition to see if a fresh installation takes care of the problem. I'm willing to break off /home into its own partition and reinstall Lenny since it works so much better on this laptop than Etch ever did. Aside from this nagging problem, of course.

This video issue and figuring out suspend/resume are pretty much the only things keeping Lenny from being as good as or better than Ubuntu Hardy on this machine. I'd like to say that I got Lenny to work better, but so far that hasn't happened.

I've tried LOTS of distributions, everything from Mandriva to PCLinuxOS to CentOS 5.2 and Fedora 9, and nothing except Ubuntu has working suspend/resume out of the box on this Gateway Solo 1450 (which comes up as "unknown" with s2ram at a console).

Just as I figured out how to control the CPU fan under ACPI, I'd love to have that same mastery over suspend/resume. If only ...

I realize that the whole Debian project ain't about me and my petty problems with my obscure hardware, but I'd like to see things working better. Maybe I'll do that reinstall and see how a fresh Lenny looks.

I stumbled across this on Slashdot, which led me to Red Hat's own release on all the new things in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 (and eventually in the free CentOS clone of RHEL).

The most shocking: Firefox 3. The Red Hat people must have a lot of faith in Mozilla's latest browser.

When it comes to the up-to-date applications, RHEL purposefully stays behind the curve so as not to break anything, especially on servers. But for desktop users, having to run Firefox 1.5 for-freakin'-ever is a bit of a bummer. Same for OpenOffice; the version I last used (probably in CentOS 4) didn't even have ODF compatibility.

Users of RHEL 5.2 will enjoy the following newish applications:

• Evolution 2.12.3
• Firefox 3
• OpenOffice 2.3.0
• Thunderbird 2.0

This is one of the parts of the release that makes me eager to try RHEL 5.2:

We also significantly improved laptop support, with Suspend/Hibernate/Resume enhancements that allow us to certify more laptop systems.

Also, many graphics drivers where updated, including a backport of the "intel" graphics driver commonly used in Desktop and Laptops.

Bottom line: These improvements make RHEL/CentOS much more attractive on the desktop (and especially for laptop users).

Could this mean a greater push from Red Hat on the desktop, even though the company has stated recently that it will not focus on that very market?

I say yes.

Red Hat 5.0 (OK, in my case the free CentOS 5.0) runs pretty damn well on my Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop), except that Suspend/Resume doesn't work ... and if it did, I would be very happy about it.

The Red Hat release didn't mention the fact that RHEL didn't suffer from the same OpenSSH vulnerability that has affected Debian-derived Linux distros, but the CentOS team does point it out while also telling CentOS users to check suspect keys from users of Debian-based systems that have had SSH contact with your RHEL/CentOS box.

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.

Ever since my exploration of the various PCLinuxOS spins, I've been impressed with the project. Now that I'm having so much relative success with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, it's unlikely that I will be running PCLinuxOS on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, but a) you never know and b) I'm looking for a good system to install for others, and PCLinuxOS is a top contender in that department.

Since I achieved the holy grail in the world of the Gateway Solo 1450 and Linux, that grail being properly working Suspend/Resume, I know that, at this point in time, Ubuntu is the best distribution for this hardware. But if I could learn more about how Suspend/Resume work, I might be able to level the playing field and run anything I want.

I've reached this point when it comes to managing the Gateway's CPU fan. I can make most any version of Linux turn the fan on and off at the proper times (and temperatures) via ACPI. I can't do the same in OpenBSD (although I really, really want to ... and I think I eventually will do it), and in FreeBSD it works automatically on the day of install and then not at all after that. But in Linux, I've got it down.

I'd like to be at the same place with Suspend/Resume. But where to start? As I've said, Ubuntu 8.04 is the first and only distro to properly Suspend/Resume this laptop. So it's certainly possible to do it with just about any modern Linux kernel, right?

Just to see where I'm at, I did a few tests with live CDs. Fedora 8 and CentOS 5 would suspend the Gateway but wouldn't resume it.

Since PCLinuxOS is renown for its hardware detection, I wanted to see how it did on Suspend/Resume.

I had discs of PCLinux2007, PCLinuxGNOME-2.21.2 and PCLinuxOS-mini-me, but I couldn't find any of them. So I reburned PCLinux2007 and downloaded the newer PCLinuxOS-GNOME-2008.

First of all, Suspend/Resume wasn't available as an option in the KDE-based PCLinux2007. When I checked the power management in KDE, I was told that I had to enable ACPI first. Since ACPI was already enabled, I didn't know what to do next.

I moved on to PCLinuxOS-GNOME-2008. First of all, the 2008 GNOME disc offers a radically different-looking desktop when compared to that of the GNOME-2.21.2 spin. I thought the earlier GNOME desktop was way, way too boring. The 2008 version, however, has a futuristic, dark theme that reminds me of the mini-me spin. I like it. I don't think it's "me," but I do like what I see.

I tried to suspend the Gateway from PCLinuxOS-GNOME-2008, and I got a message that Suspend failed. But I also got some help. There was a link in the message to the HAL Quirk Site, where one of the links focuses on ways to fix poorly sleeping PCs.

I haven't been through it yet, but I do plan to scour the site for hints on how I can tame Suspend/Resume on this laptop. It's a nice touch from the PCLinuxOS team: Something doesn't work, but you immediately get the help you need to tackle the problem. Very nice, indeed.

While I continue to admire PCLinuxOS, I'd love to get Suspend/Resume working in Debian Lenny, the distro I use the most. Without Suspend/Resume working there, however, I will most likely be migrating over to Ubuntu on this laptop. I left the Gateway on for most of the weekend, seeing how the Suspend/Resume worked in Ubuntu 8.04, and I continue to be amazed and impressed at how well Ubuntu is taking care of me. It seems like a little thing, but to me it's huge.

On a desktop, it's not such a big deal. But with global warming, not to mention the cost of electricity, power management should be a top priority for all hardware manufacturers and OS coders.

And if you like GNOME but haven't tried PCLinuxGNOME-2008, I strongly suggest that you take a look.