Suspend/Resume on Inspiron 7500 potato

[Christian Lemer <chris@ucmb.ulb.ac.be>]

I recently installed Potaton on my Inspiron 7500 and have to say that
I'm really happy with it.

The installation was quite straightforward but I still have some
little annoyances, and my major one is about the Suspend/Resume.

I try to suspend-to-disk and rebuild a 'suspend' partition with the
dedicated utility. That's seems OK because now the BIOS message about
'Missing suspend file' do not appear anymore.

Suspend and Resume seems to work right... but

1. When resuming my network (PCMCIA/DHCP) is stuck and I cannot manage
   to make it work again.

   If I try to reactivate the network with /etc/init.d/pcmcia restart
   it complains about "Device busy"
  
   I try different solutions:

        Add APM=eject in /etc/pcmcia/apm.opts so it should eject and
        re-insert the card during suspend/resume.

        Uncomment /sbin/ifconfig eth0 down # prevent "card busy" in
        /apm/event.d/pcmcia so that network should be suspended also.
        
        Then I found a message in the news suggesting the following
        procedure

                /etc/init.d/dhclient stop
                ifconfig eth0 down
                cardctl eject
                cardctl insert
                /etc/init.d/dhclient start

        Unfortunately I don't have dhclient installed on my
        laptop... and dhcp is still working. So I installed
        dhcp-client and noticed that if apm was present,
        /etc/init.dhclient will just do nothing...

        Any suggestion are welcome...


2. I'm really not convinced that the suspend-to-disk is correct
   because it takes only 1-2 seconds to suspend and maybe 3 seconds to
   resume.... I think I remember that I've read somewhere that on the
   Inspiron, when resuming to disk, we should not use the 'usual' key
   sequence (Fn-Esc) but another sequence...  but unfortunately I
   don't remember which.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Chris.

-- 
Christian Lemer
Service de Conformation des Macromolecules Biologiques et de Bioinformatique
Universite Libre de Bruxelles                       Brussels Free University
chris@ucmb.ulb.ac.be     +32.2.648.52.00    http://www.ucmb.ulb.ac.be/~chris