T61, Suspend, and You
Sunday October 28, 2007
So, along with my glowing accolades of a few days ago, I’ll offer a little painful reality.
The T61, as I said, is a heck of a nice little machine. Fast, smooth, quiet, and the works. However, there are a few things that have proven to be not so nice: most notably that which is absolutely necessary in a laptop: suspend and resume. I’ve spent far more time than I’d like searching the ‘net for hints/suggestions/hints/etc., but I’ve not quite found any full, working solutions. It would seem that the problem stems from the fact that I’m using nvidia’s binary driver (100.14.23)… or at least that’s not helping. Also, it would appear that OpenSUSE 10.3, which I’m running on the T61, is using suspend version 0.69.9, which doesn’t happen to know what to do with my T61 model (6549CT0).
Oh, another little gem: apparently using the nvidia driver also means that you can’t adjust the backlight brightness (FN-Home/End) from within X either. Current workaround: switch to VT 1 – 6 and adjust the brightness from there. This is most certainly an nVidia driver problem, since it works just fine with the VESA driver.
Well, I would love to have a totally happy story with no such silliness, but such is life and such is choosing to run Linux. =:)
[[ Update: ]] Well, shimber me timbers! After yet another day of hacking at things, I still can’t get suspend to disk to work on this T61, but I can get suspend to ram working (!!!!!) by putting:
S2RAM_OPTS=”-f”
into the on-OpenSUSE-10.3-non-existent file “/etc/pm/config.d/defaults”. Yay!! This makes me much happy. Oh–and don’t even try using the “nv” driver… you’ll lose your screen entirely. =:/ Progress comes in small steps, apparently.
Sounds like you’re being bitten by the “proprietary drivers suck” thing on linux đ
You should’ve bought something with Intel drivers…
Have you tried
Option “NvAGP” “1”
in the Device section of xorg.conf? This made me s2disk work on my desktop computer.
@jospoortvliet: Yeah, thanks for the “neener neener neener”, but I didn’t buy it. It’s my work-provided laptop. =:/
@Andras, Yeah, I did try that. Actually, I don’t know if I’ve tried using s2disk all that much. I was mainly focusing on the much-quicker s2ram.
I’ve re-installed OpenSUSE in 32-bit mode to see if I can get around some of the stupidness, so I’ll start playing with suspend next. The thing that sucks is that out of the box, OpenSUSE is using VESA drivers, which only gives me 1024×768. =:( Stretchy, blurry, un-goodness. Isn’t there a non-proprietary driver for this chip? (nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M)
I have a T61, but I’m running Gentoo on it. The newest nVidia drivers are supposed to suspend properly (and I’ve tested it once or twice, but I don’t suspend or hibernate very often). I hear they have a fix for changing the brightness too.
Surprisingly, it’s not just the proprietary drivers that suck. I’ve had a lot of fun getting the IWL4965 Intel wireless to work. I had it kernel panic the laptop on boot the other day. I hear that the Atheros chipsets might be better supported, but mine works fairly well normally.
Most of the chipsets in the T61 are relatively new, and driver support seems to still be stabilizing (do you have one with a webcam? I can’t get any useful V4L output out of it, but it does work). It’s much better than when I got the laptop a few months ago already, and fortunately, with open source, it can’t really get worse. I love the laptop.
I have a Dell D830 with the intel 4965agn chip and I’ve had pretty good luck with the iwlwifi drivers for it. As for the kernel oopsing bug, that seemed happen with an older version of it. You might want to see if you can update the driver from intellinuxwireless.org. Which, lately aside from weird bugs that spam my dmesg from time to time and the occasional firmware crash that necessitates an rmmod/modprobe cycle of the driver, the driver has worked really well.
I have a T61p with openSUSE 10.3 installed. Most of the components are working fairly well with the exception of the Intel Turbo memory.
I also have the intel 4965agn chip and is working fine except that the wireless light has completely disappeared.
I was able to suspend the computer to ram with the S2RAM_OPTS=â-fâ option also although i get the following error every time it resume from suspend:
ACPI Error (evgpe-0705): No handler or method for GPE[ D], disabling event [20070126]
It seems that this is not affecting the system at all so is not a concern at the moment.
Also, I cant adjust thebacklight brightness nor the volume(up/down) using the keyboard.