linux and real hibernation success
(I sent this to the Z505 list earlier, but after seeing sme discussion
of hibernation with Debian another Linuxes on this list I thought
people here might get a kick from it. Assuming that same BIOS is used
in several different laptops (which I beleive the Phoenix BIOS is)
than the following story will be useful to morethan just Z505 users
running Debian.)
First, let me apologize for the unscientific nature of this
description of how I got real save-to-disk hibernation working with my
Debian "woody" installation on a Z505R. I had given up when a tech at
Sony lied to me telling me that hibernate looked just like suspend
mode. I was satisfied with his assurance that it was consuming less
power, even tho it was not saving out to disk. So I stopped trying,
and then a curious set of events resulted in hibernation suddenly
working as I expected it to!
Previously I had a problem with hibernation via F-12 in both Win98 and
Debian, in that it would just throw the machine into suspend mode. I
could not swap batteries or do anything to remove power to the
machine, which is what I wanted. In Win98 F-12 would put it into a
mummy suspend, a sleep from which it never woke.
I contacted Sony support and the guy was very nice and walked me thru
some Win98 stuff, and then after resetting my BIOS to the factory
defaults we basically had the same behavior (accept it wasn't locking
up win98 anymore) of just going into suspend rather than hibernate.
He assured me that this was normal, perhaps just to get me off the
phone. Not knowing any better, I just chalked it up to a lame
definition of "hibernation" and decided to live with it. I also
didn't want to push it since I HAD installed Debian, and I figured
that if it came down to it, they wold just blame it on Linux.
A week later tho, things changed. Being a Scheme and Lisp buff, I
decided to try and get the MZScheme bootable kernel running on my
laptop in a attempt to satisfy my perverse need for something
resembling a scheme OS. I tried getting it to run with LILO[1], the
de-facto Debian boot loader, and the boot loader nearly every linux
distribution uses. It wasn't working, so I figured that I should
follow their instructions and use GRUB[2]. Well, it turned out it
wasn't a bootloader problem but I was stoked with GRUB and really
liked the ability to define boot menus. So I stayed with GRUB.
Later that evening I F-12ed and low and behold, the BIOS screen
showing the hibernation progress popped up and it actually saved the
system state to disk. Just to be sure I was getting real hibernation
I unplugged the machine and took the battery out. After putting the
plug and battery back I flicked the power switch like it suggest in
the manual and presto, the hibernation BIOS screen came up and I
watched it reload the system state, Linux restarted, apmd restarted my
wireless LAN card and I was right back where I left off.
So, my unscietific hypothesis is that LILO was causing some problems
for me. Going with GRUB changed something which allowed hibernation
to work. Perhaps it allowed the BIOS to find the hibernation
partition.
[1] LInux LOader Unofficial Home Page
http://judi.greens.org/lilo/
[2] GNU GRand Unified Bootloader
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
--
Craig Brozefsky <craig@red-bean.com>
Lisp Web Dev List http://www.red-bean.com/lispweb
--- The only good lisper is a coding lisper. ---
--
Craig Brozefsky <craig@onshore.com>
Senior Programmer onShore, Inc.
http://www.onshore.com (312) 850 5200
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