[gobolinux-users] Useful things for laptops

[Rohan Nicholls]

Sean Russell wrote:
> On Tuesday 11 July 2006 10:19, Rohan Nicholls wrote:
>> some of this is already implemented in KDE, but I don't think so. 
>> Please correct me if I am wrong.
>>
>> * Consistently (mostly) if I close the lid of the laptop it suspends.
> 
> Linux does this via ACPI, but you have to enable it and have swsusp 
> compiled into your kernel.  So the question becomes, should the kernel 
> be compiled with swsusp, and should hibernate be installed, by default?  
> These are both useless on desktops.
> 
> Hmm... That makes me wonder if the Gobo install scripts could be altered 
> to support profiles.

The nice thing with the kernel recipe is that you can enable this easily 
in the menuconfig, and the recipe handles the rest so nicely for you.

> 
>>  I think it starts out suspending to ram and then to the hard drive
>> after a certain amount of time.  Open the lid, wait a bit, login and
> 
> Linux's suspend-to-RAM has only ever worked on one of the five laptops 
> I've owned, and that inconsistently.  I haven't heard of a RAM -> HD 
> suspend chain, but it would be nice.  Are you sure that Windows can do 
> tihs?

No I am not, but this is what I see:
Shut the laptop lid and the hardrive does stuff (light get busy), and 
then the power light goes from bright to dim to bright etc.

If you open the lid while this is still going on, windows comes up 
pretty fast.

If you don't do anything with the laptop for a while the light goes out 
completely, this might only mean that it has spun down the harddrives 
and has suspended to ram and is in a powersave mode, but I have left it 
like that over night and when I open the lid the next day and hit the 
power button, the lights come on and the "resuming windows" progress bar 
comes up, and then I have the login and am back where I left off.  I 
don't know what is going on there, only what I see from the outside, but 
it does seem to be a 2 step process that is going on.

And it has its flaws, sometimes taking a long time to get back up to 
speed, sometimes I have to plug in a usbstick and up plug it to get the 
graphics going, and sometimes the only solution is to power off, but 
mostly it will come up normally.

So the kernel option should give the laptop the ability to suspend, and 
then it is just a matter of setting up acpid to handle the suspending.

Thanks for the info,

rohan