linux suspend to ram disappoints

By basd on Oct 8, 2009 | In kde4, linux, opensuse

The long delay to boot computers has always annoyed me. Why? Why? Why? For instance, why not dump all this stuff to an EPROM and never boot again? (Well until the next upgrade.)

So you would think that "suspend to RAM" and "suspend to Disk" would be reasonable alternatives, and in fact the Vista shutdown button uses that option -- which is fairly essential considering how long it takes Vista to boot.

...

Now, I do some work where I want to open my computer and have it "instant on" and then when I am finished, slam the computer shut and have it instant off (but ready to instant on again).

Yes, we have all that don't we? Which is why I've found myself using Vista on my Gateway LT3103 in these situations. And, although I can the run OpenOffice, the Remote Desktop to my office and Firefox -- meeting 99% of my needs -- my primary document system is in Linux. Yikes! And sadly, all of my software WORKS in Linux, so it doesn't matter whether I boot to Linux or Vista -- save for the "suspend" issue. But in Vista, I end up missing a lot of features (that is, programs) that I regularly use. Such as, eg., Akregator news reador.

But the suspend in Linux just doesn't work for me. Oh, sometimes, and then again not. It will either (a) come back to life; or (b) enter the weird zone and require a hard reset. I am unable to predict which will occur.

Actually, suspend to ram has become rather reliable on my Sony Vaio. But occasionally unreliable to the point I set the option for "close lid" to just shut the screen off and keep running. Waste of battery, but at least the computer was still working when I opened it. But, then I demoted it from this work and began using the Gateway.

On the Gateway (the computer I most need it on) suspend to ram just doesn't happen in Linux. Why not? I don't know. As far as I know, exact same software packages/setup as on the Sony.

And on my HP Pavilion zd7000 (the zombie computer*) I have about a 50/50 chance of return from suspend. Too bad, because for environmental reasons its best to shut it down when not in use, but I don't have the patience for re-boot so I just leave it running all the time.

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*zombie computer -- you know, doesn't work anymore ... BUT DOES!!! Which is to say if I try to boot the WindowsXP Professional that came on it, I get a BSOD crash while drivers are loading. This appeared to be an agp440 crash, so I followed Microsoft's instructions on how to disable the agp440 driver -- but now it just crashes on vidstub. For all appearances, the computer is completely dead, presumably a hardware problem.

That is, unless I boot in linux, whereupon to all appearances, it works just fine. I wonder where I can go find a bunch of "dead" zd7000s. I bet I could buy them up for about $1.50 apiece and have an entire fleet of very capable computers.

I would try a fresh install, but it's just not worth it. If I install WindowsXP over Linux, it will probably kill GRUB, which is fixable, but always scares me. And secondly, I still have some archive materials on the Windows partition that are accessible from linux and I would rather not lose them.

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