Critical Exponent

I’ve been playing around with suspend2 since the Fedora 4 install. I’d gotten it to almost work: I could hibernate from run level 3, which meant I got the benefits of a quick boot but not of having my session preserved. The problem was the graphics card. I didn’t have time to investigate, and at any rate, I figured Fedora Core 5 would come out soon.

I have just gotten suspend2 to work with Fedora 5 and the nVidia drivers! I can now truly hibernate my sessions!

I followed the directions in Matthias Hensler’s page. I set upyum to access his repository, and then installed the modified kernel sources and the eye-candy progress meter: # yum install userui-suspend2-fbsplash userui-suspend2-theme-fedorabubbles # yum install kernel-suspend2

I added kernel parameters to the kernel line in /etc/grub.conf to disable SELinux, set the framebuffer for the progress meter, and disable the kernel’s AGP support:

   kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.16-1.2111_1.rhfc5.cubbi_suspend2 ..... selinux=0 vga=791 agp=0

I also add a duplicate line with the additiional kernel option noresume2 to boot without resuming a hibernated kernel.

In nVidia device section of /etc/Xorg,conf, I enable nVidia’s own AGP: Option “NvAgp” “1″

I modified the /etc/hibernate/hibernate-conf script using this as a reference. Aside from unloading the necessary modules, and such niceties as locking the screen on hibernation and resetting smartdimmer on resume (since the screen brightness does not appear to be persistent) the crucial line appears to be the expected_compression:

 ProcSetting expected_compression 50

That’s it! Typing, as root, pm-hibernate hibernates me nicely. Andrei’s page says he had trouble suspending/resuming on battery power, but I don’t seem to have that problem. The eye candy does not work perfectly: the expected_compression line makes the progress meter appear only fleetingly both on suspend and resume, which is too bad– but at the end of the day, insignificant.

One thing I wonder: many of the references imply there’s a hibernate button in the “Logout” dialog. I don’t see it. I may be missing the corresponding package. I will try installing gnome-power-manager and see how that works. (Either that or a shell script will be necessary to invoke pm-hibernate as non-root.)

This entry was posted on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Sony VAIO VGN S580. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.