Sysadmin Ramblings

There’s nothing special to do here, the only caveat is that you need to enable the non-free repo from fusion and install wl for the wireless driver. The problem I have is that the machine crashes on resume from sleep about 1 out of every 4 times, it’s become very annoying. The machine boots fast, but it’s nicer to just resume. I thought it was the wl driver, so I have gnome-power-manager taking the module out (I think).
[thomas@ideapad pm]$ cat config.d/modules
SUSPEND_MODULES="wl"
[thomas@ideapad pm]$
AFAIK this should remove the module before suspending the machine, but I can’t verify that right now. Anyone have any ideas?

I’ve discovered that disabling gnome-power-manager completely will allow the machine to suspend and resume without crashing. If I suspend manually
[root@ideapad ~]# echo mem >/sys/power/state
Then everything is fine, this isn’t ideal, but it does work reliably…I’ve suspended/resumed about 10 times now without a problem :-( I made this a script for convenience, and I lock the screen too, just in case… [thomas@ideapad ~]$ cat /usr/bin/hack
#!/bin/bash
 
gnome-screensaver-command --lock && \
echo mem >/sys/power/state


I then chmod 666 /sys/power/state in my rc.local and i can run hack whenever I want to suspend the box. There has to be a better way, I guess I’ll start disabling each module in pm-suspend until things start working, but that might take a while…I suspect it’s pm-suspend that’s causing the crash, gnome-power-manager looks to be essentially a wrapper for pm-suspend.

Everything else works great on this little machine, it’s perfect for lugging around, it’s light, fast and has a great screen. The SUSE that comes with the machine is unusable IMHO, but I’m more of a Red Hat person anyway. I’m at the Red Hat summit (2009) and the ideapad is perfect for this, i just pop it in the bag and go from talk to talk, it’s so light I sometimes forget it’s there. Honestly, it’s only slightly heavier than my nokia 810.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 07:38 and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.