Re: Is my old RedHat computer doomed?

Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:54:38 +0100, Will Kemp wrote:

- The default AC power management settings cause a warning that closing
the lid won't stop the machine and it may fry itself. It doesn't
matter whether I set the AC lid closed action to Suspend or Hibernate
- the effect is the same - the machine beeps three times and fails to
shut down, though the screen does lock.
I've never seen it. But i don't really understand how you can see it if
the lid's closed, anyway! Unless, of course, you're using an external
display.

The warning just appeared. I can't remember what I did to get it. As for the rest, I could hear the thing beeping after I closed the lid and didn't hear fans and disk spinning down. When I opened the lid to investigate, there was the 'screen locked display'.

If you do 'lsmod | grep thinkpad' is the thinkpad_acpi module inserted?

I just tried again, first on battery and then on mains with the action set to 'hibernate'. I wuz wrong - it does hibernate, but it takes a relatively long time to do so. Much longer than the old Thinkpad 560Z.

More RAM maybe? It does take quite a long time. There's a lot of disk I/O to be done. Particularly if there are pages swapped out on the swap partition.

BTW, what's the difference between 'hibernate' and 'suspend'?

"Suspend" suspends to RAM - i.e., it leaves the contents of RAM as they are, pretty much, and does an orderly shutdown.

"Hibernate" suspends to disk - i.e., it writes the contents of the RAM to the swap partition and then shuts down.

Suspend is much faster, both shutting down and starting up again, but it uses power while it's suspended. You ought to be able to go a couple of days in suspend on the battery though. Or at least a day, anyway. Hibernate takes a lot longer but it doesn't use any more battery than it uses when it's just switched off.

Hibernate won't always work - if the total memory used (in RAM and in swap) are more than the size of the swap partition (after the hibernate routine's cleared out unnecessary junk), it will just come back up again.

I've got 4GB RAM and i don't use swap, but i've only got a 2GB swap partition (dating from when i only had 2GB RAM) - so if the RAM's more than 50% full, hibernating wouldn't work. It's very unlikely to be, but i never use hibernate anyway. I suspend at least once a day and very rarely do a full shutdown. It starts very quickly that way. If you use wireless, make sure you've got the latest kernel version as there has been a bit of a problem with NetworkManager after resume, for some people - but it seems to be fixed in the latest Fedora kernel.

On a different point, you'll may find that screen brightness keys don't
work - but you can change screen brightness in the power management
dialog.

I haven't tried that yet - just the audio volume. Those buttons do seem to work.

Yeah, so does the "lock screen" key <Fn><F2> and, i think, the hibernate key <Fn><F4> (i think it's "hibernate", anyway, it might be "suspend" - but i'm not going to try it right now!)

BTW, does the 'blue button' only ever do stuff at boot time, or did I kill off a heap of its functions when I reformatted the disk?

It only works at boot time. It wouldn't make any difference what else was on the disk, if it's not built into Linux, it won't work.

For more information about Linux on the Thinkpad, check out http://thinkwiki.org

Oh, and, by the way... You did install the x86_64 version of Fedora, didn't you? If you didn't, scrap the existing install and install that. It's lots faster.



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