Yet more reasons to love Ubuntu.

My Dell laptop has had an issue for some time. It’s not a major one for me, just a bit of a niggle. Problem is it doesn’t suspend properly. Well to be exact it doesn’t come back after it suspends properly. I’ve had this problem for a while, but haven’t really been bothered by it because I rarely need to suspend my laptop. It generally stays on.

Some time ago at a HantsLUG meeting, I showed the laptop to Paul Sladen who valiantly tried to figure out why this happened, in amongst lots of other people asking him questions. It was a bit of a tricky one so he filed a bug on the Ubuntu Bug tracking system. I had already registered so in fact all he had to do was open a browser on my laptop and point to the right place to start the bug reporting process. It was very quick and easy to do.

I hadn’t thought about the bug for some time, then at the weekend at the LUGRadio Live 2006 I bumped into Matthew Garrett outside the Hogs Head pub in Wolverhampton. I mentioned the bug to him and in a drunken haze he suggested I mail him the information/bug report so he can have a look at it.

Today I happened to see him online in #lugradio – the IRC channel on freenode and here’s how the conversation went:-

Note: pontifex is me, mjg59 is Matthew.

Jul 25 16:05:21 [pontifex] mjg59: can I throw you a possibly acpi related bug?
Jul 25 16:05:25 [mjg59] pontifex: Sure
Jul 25 16:05:49 [pontifex] mjg59: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/48209
Jul 25 16:06:08 [mjg59] pontifex: Oh, fun
Jul 25 16:06:13 [mjg59] pontifex: What do you mean by "it fails"?
Jul 25 16:06:26 [pontifex] good question, I didn't type it - the sladen did
Jul 25 16:06:35 [mjg59] Ah
Jul 25 16:06:39 [pontifex] black screen, no x
Jul 25 16:06:42 [mjg59] Why he filed it against acpi-support, I have no idea
Jul 25 16:06:47 [mjg59] Closed nvidia drivers?
Jul 25 16:06:55 [pontifex] tried nv too
Jul 25 16:07:58 [mjg59] Same problem? Suckage.
Jul 25 16:08:04 [pontifex] yus
Jul 25 16:08:09 [mjg59] One of your drivers is probably doing something horribly wrong
Jul 25 16:08:33 [pontifex] it also has blootoof and ipw2200
Jul 25 16:08:37 [pontifex] if that's interesting
Jul 25 16:09:24 [mjg59] If sdhci is loaded, can you try unloading that first?
Jul 25 16:09:50 [pontifex] unloading before suspend?
Jul 25 16:10:00 [pontifex] it is loaded, yes
Jul 25 16:10:13 [mjg59] Yeah, unloaded before suspend
Jul 25 16:10:24 [pontifex] ok, machine is at home, will have a go tonight

Tonight I typed the following on my laptop:-

$ sudo rmmod sdhci

Then I hit the power button which shows up the options menu for logging out, powering down, hibernating and so on. I chose to suspend, and as usual the laptop went into suspend mode.

Now for the real test. Once it had gone right down and the power light was glowing slowly I tapped the power button again to wake the laptop up. It woke and I was presented with the usual screensaver logon dialog. I typed in my password and my session was restored. My ssh sessions to remote machines were intact, as was my IRC session.

I thanked Matthew and updated the bug report.

Who says support on Linux is crappy? Have that!