Laptops: Suspend, Hibernate and DSDT

[StevenOfNine]

Agreed.  The more I become comfortable with editing files, the more I recognise one that's a bit beyond my ability to easily fix.

I'll be lazy and wait for a 'canned' version!

[Ɗα√ϵς§]

I'll be lazy and wait for a 'canned' version!

You won't get one. Not easily anyway. If you follow my instructions, you'll have 2 grub entries, one the same as the old one, one with the modifies initrd. So if the mod doesn't work, you still boot up using the old one.

I know it looks complex, but most of that is just to ensure that you can still boot up safely.

[organica]

Thanks for the HOWTO, but this procedure does not work for laptops with 1280x800 screen resolution and the Intel 915 chipset running 915resolution.

The scripts need a few more steps to recall the 915resolution service.  I tried to add it but I'm new to PCLOS and could not find the scripts in the usual places.

[StevenOfNine]

Thanks for the HOWTO, but this procedure does not work for laptops with 1280x800 screen resolution and the Intel 915 chipset running 915resolution.

Seconded.  I have the same equipment.

[adriantry]

Thanks for the HOWTO, but this procedure does not work for laptops with 1280x800 screen resolution and the Intel 915 chipset running 915resolution.

Seconded.  I have the same equipment.

Thirded! Although I have an nVidia card.

Suspend worked without any fiddling with 0.93a, so I assume that something with power management has changed with power management in 2007.

That's the cost of progress! There are so many things I'm happy about with 2007 that I'm willing to put up with minor inconveniences! I hope we can get it working, though - I rely on suspend a lot.

Adrian

Edit: I've just switched back to the open source nvidia driver, but still can't suspend.

[Ɗα√ϵς§]

Added important note re Hibernation/Resume to original post.

[thom4s]

I have a Clevo M120W (centrino based, 855 chipset with integrated graphics and realtek sound). I followed the guide but didn't do anything from the second post (DSDT or something). I can do hibernate no problem but when I choose 'suspend' simply nothing happens. There's nothing in dmesg either it just does nothing. Any ideas?

[kulturloseramerikaner]

I couldn't get this running at all, and after opening up the mount points in control center, I see why - somehow, I managed to install without a swap partition!  How would I go about sizing down my linux partition so I can create a swap manually?

[Ɗα√ϵς§]

I have a Clevo M120W (centrino based, 855 chipset with integrated graphics and realtek sound). I followed the guide but didn't do anything from the second post (DSDT or something). I can do hibernate no problem but when I choose 'suspend' simply nothing happens. There's nothing in dmesg either it just does nothing. Any ideas?

It could be the way ACPI is implemented on your laptop. One thing I did was to install "kpowersave". That also gives an icon in your system tray. See if you can suspend from there.

I couldn't get this running at all, and after opening up the mount points in control center, I see why - somehow, I managed to install without a swap partition!  How would I go about sizing down my linux partition so I can create a swap manually?

You can only shrink a mount point that is not mounted. It may be best to run the Live CD. Then run the PCLinuxOS Control Centre > Mount Points > Create Delete Resize mount point. Unmount one of your partitions (if necessary) and click on the "resize" button. Reduce it until you have the desired amount of swap spare. If you think you will ever want to remaster your setup, make it 2Gb. Otherwise twice your RAM up to 2Gb. Once done, click in the unused space and set it up as a swap partition.

Once done, you don't have to do any more, as swap partitions are recognised automatically.

[malcolmcelyn]

I've been reading this thread with interest. I have a Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop. When I used Big Daddy, Standby (or Suspend to RAM) was no problem. In fact, when I opened the lid, not only did the laptop start normally, but the wireless connection restarted too. In other words, worked as expected. Since installing the various 2007 Test Releases and now finally, the 2007 Final version, I am unable to get this to work. Standby leaves the screen on (black with flashing cursor at top left) whereas Suspend switches off the screen but won't restart it. I've tried following this thread with no success. I've also, as per Davecs instructions, tried variations on installing and removing packages listed in Synaptic (ACPI and so on). Any further ideas? To be honest, as a laptop user who has to switch on and off many times a day, it's beginning to spoil my enjoyment of PCLOS.

[Scotty Dog]

I just set my Inspiron 1100 up to shut down when I close the lid and gave up on trying to make the lan come back on. However, I tested an HD install of 2007 final on my daughter's Dell D600, and everything worked flawlessly. I just enabled ACPI, set it to suspend to RAM on lid close, closed it, opened it back up, and it came back on with a live connection and everything. Can't wait for my student loan money to get here so I can order my own D600 and part out this 1100 on ebay!

[Ex Nihilo]

I downloaded the asl file for my laptop, and installed iasl... but I get a string of errors telling me about non-ascii characters in the asl file (which appears to be a binary).

[magnus@localhost Desktop]$ iasl Alienware-Area-51m_7700-1.00.04-custom.asl

Intel ACPI Component Architecture
ASL Optimizing Compiler version 20061109 [Feb  6 2007]
Copyright (C) 2000 - 2006 Intel Corporation
Supports ACPI Specification Revision 3.0a

Non-ASCII character [0x80] found in line 1, file offset 0x25
Non-ASCII character [0xB2] found in line 2, file offset 0x2C
Non-ASCII character [0x81] found in line 2, file offset 0x2F
Non-ASCII character [0x80] found in line 2, file offset 0x3C
Non-ASCII character [0xC0] found in line 2, file offset 0x44
Non-ASCII character [0xD1] found in line 2, file offset 0x45
Non-ASCII character [0xFE] found in line 2, file offset 0x46
Non-ASCII character [0x81] found in line 2, file offset 0x4B
Non-ASCII character [0x80] found in line 2, file offset 0x53
Non-ASCII character [0x80] found in line 2, file offset 0x57
1783 non-ASCII characters found in input source text, could be a binary file
Error    4061 - Invalid characters found in file Alienware-Area-51m_7700-1.00.04-custom.asl

What now?

[Ɗα√ϵς§]

Magnus -- this suggests that the asl file is faulty!

I've recently had to re-install my laptop, and I've done a minimal amount of hacking to get things right.

1. When I ran the live CD, I pressed the left arrow to access the GRUB line, and changed the vga setting to vga=0. This saves you having to change the bootloader later -- when you install, it omits the "framebuffer" bootup and defaults to pure text 80x25 bootup. This is often necessary for Hibernate/Suspend to work for some reason.

2. After installation, I had to go into KDE Control Centre ( > Power Control > Laptop Battery) to enable KLaptop. You have to set the "Helper Application" on the ACPI Config, and set "Show Battery Monitor" in the Battery tab . If you don't get the ACPI Config tab, this suggests that there is not a full ACPI implementation (at least that's how the OS sees it) and it may be time to mess with DSDT.

3. Where KLaptop falls short for me is that it does not seem to recognise the Sleep and Power buttons. So I can set the lid switch to Hibernate, but that's it. At this point the Sleep and Power Buttons do nothing (well if I hold the Power Button down for 4 secs it switches off).

4. Next thing I installed KPowerSave and ran it. Now the Power button works. The sleep button appears to work, but I cannot return to my desktop. I then Quit from KPowerSave, and told it not to run in future. Power button still works...

5. The sleep button was the remaining problem. Following some e-mail correspondence with the testing team, Jmiahman suggested that I look at what the program klaptop_acpi_helper actually does. So after running klaptop_acpi_helper --help, I tried running it with the --suspend switch in a console, and it suspended and returned perfectly.

6. The next thing I did was to alter the file /etc/acpi/events/sleep to read as follows:

event=button/sleep
action=klaptop_acpi_helper --suspend

rebooted and tried the sleep key. It slept. Pressed space bar. It woke up - perfectly.

Now the original second line in the file reads:

action=/usr/sbin/pmsuspend memory

It's fairly obvious that pmsuspend doesn't work on my machine!

Why does one program work and another does not? Hard to say.

I note that the "suspend-s2ram" has an entirely different executable: "s2ram". Wonder what that does? Let's test it! Back in a few minutes!


EDIT: Nope. It did not recover.

The point being that there seem to be multiple tools for this but only one works for me.

I think the difference is that KLaptop uses "wltool" (Whitelist Tool) which is a database of various hardware with conditions and actions for recovery from various situations. But I could be wrong...

[pongster]

5. The sleep button was the remaining problem. Following some e-mail correspondence with the testing team, Jmiahman suggested that I look at what the program klaptop_acpi_helper actually does. So after running klaptop_acpi_helper --help, I tried running it with the --suspend switch in a console, and it suspended and returned perfectly.

6. The next thing I did was to alter the file /etc/acpi/events/sleep to read as follows:

event=button/sleep
action=klaptop_acpi_helper --suspend

rebooted and tried the sleep key. It slept. Pressed space bar. It woke up - perfectly.

Now the original second line in the file reads:

action=/usr/sbin/pmsuspend memory

It's fairly obvious that pmsuspend doesn't work on my machine!

Why does one program work and another does not? Hard to say.

I note that the "suspend-s2ram" has an entirely different executable: "s2ram". Wonder what that does? Let's test it! Back in a few minutes!


EDIT: Nope. It did not recover.

The point being that there seem to be multiple tools for this but only one works for me.

I think the difference is that KLaptop uses "wltool" (Whitelist Tool) which is a database of various hardware with conditions and actions for recovery from various situations. But I could be wrong...

Hi davecs!
would you happen to know which command klaptop_acpi_helper uses to suspend to disk?  kpowersave hibernate and sleep dont work for me either... maybe we can find out what klaptop calls to do the hibernate...

cheers

[Ɗα√ϵς§]

klaptop_acpi_helper --hibernate

However, it worked from the command line in a terminal, but not correctly from the "lid close" action, it seemed to start going into hibernate, then come back, start again, ad infinitum, had to force a closedown. I suspect it was "calling itself" somehow. Either that, or it didn't block out future "lid close" signals, and stores up 100s of "keypresses".

The thing being that kpowersave's hibernate did work for me! The program called by default is called "laptop_mode", but this didn't help.

You could just hash out the lines in /etc/acpi/actions to prevent the lid down button working at all, and just use KLaptop from the system tray to hibernate... I would have done something similar with the sleep button had I no been able to resolve the problem.