Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

The ACPI daemon controls what happens when you close the laptop lid or press the sleep button (Fn-F4). Its configuration files are in /etc/acpi/events. To make the laptop suspend to RAM, put a file in there (name isn’t important as long as it doesn’t start with a period) called lid.conf:

event=button/lid
action=/usr/sbin/pm-suspend

More information is in the acpid man page.

For you emacs users, make sure you remove any backup files, because acpid will parse those too. I had lid.conf and lid.conf~. When I sent SIGHUP to acpid to cause it to reparse its configuration, it read both. The result was that closing the lid caused the laptop to sleep. Then when I opened the lid, the second event file was run and it went back to sleep again.

For pinto (Thinkpad T60), I wanted to get hibernation working. First I tried the patch method from the Suspend2 web site. I got an error running the apply script, probably because I’m not running a vanilla kernel, but the Fedora Core 5 SMP kernel. While looking for a solution to that, I found Matthias Hensler’s Software Suspend instructions that had prebuilt kernel RPMs. Although he didn’t have an SMP version, he did mention ATrpms had them. I used yum to install kernel-suspend2-smp-2.6.17-1.2157_1.rhfc5.cubbi_suspend2 and used the rest of the Hensler instructions. When I booted that kernel, My wireless ethernet failed. Part of the wireless ethernet package is in kernel modules, which aren’t part of the ATrpm kernel. So I cheated and copied these files from /lib/modules/2.6.17-1.2157_FC5smp to /lib/modules/2.6.17-1.2157_1.rhfc5.cubbi_suspend2smp:

/updates/drivers/net/wireless/ipw3945.ko
/updates/net/ieee80211/*


when I restarted, it still didn’t work. Trying a manual insmod showed lots of unresolved symbols. Running depmod (as root) and another reboot fixed that.

Now the box hibernates, but hangs when booting up to resume. Suspend works fine, though using pm-suspend.

On pinto (Thinkpad T60) my clock was set to localtime by that “other” OS. In the KDE Control Panel, clicking “set date and time automatically” failed to find the time server. From the command line, I did:

service ntpd stop
ntpdate 0.pool.ntp.org
service ntpd start

Check with:

ntpq
ntpq> pe

and now it works. Never did find out why the control panel couldn’t do it.