Sul mio Acer Extensa 5620 sono tornato definitivamente alla versione 32 bit di Debian Lenny (ancora in fase testing). Diversamente da Ubuntu e Fedora, qui c'è qualcosina in più da fare per far funzionare alcuni dispositivi e caratteristiche. In particolare ho dovuto sudare non poco per riuscire a far funzionare a dovere il Suspend to RAM, cioè quella funzione che mette il computer in uno stato di risparmio energetico senza spegnerlo, usando soltanto l'energia necessaria a conservare il contenuto della memoria. Questo è l'equivalente dello stato di STOP dei Macintosh e permette di avere tempi di ripristino molto brevi: due o tre secondi. In realtà il notebook entrava correttamente nello stato di sospensione ma al "resume", dopo una sorta di reset dell'alimentazione, esso rimaneva bloccato, col monitor spento e con la ventola in funzione. A quel punto non c'era altro da fare che resettare brutalmente il computer, perdendo ovviamente la sessione salvata in memoria.

Per risolvere ho iniziato a studiare un po' la documentazione del comando s2ram e, successivamente, questa pagina del progetto openSUSE, dalle quali ho ricavato molte informazioni utili. Effettuando i primi test, ho notato che la mia piattaforma non era tra quelle supportate:

debian:~# s2ram -n
Machine unknown
This machine can be identified by:
sys_vendor = "Acer "
sys_product = "Extensa 5620 "
sys_version = "0100 "
bios_version = "V1.16 "
See http://suspend.sf.net/s2ram-support.html for details.

If you report a problem, please include the complete output above.

Di conseguenza, non mi rimaneva che avviare il sistema con una shell di init e andare per tentativi.

Quasi immediatamente ho notato che con il comando s2ram -f -a3 il suspend ed il successivo resume andavano sempre a buon fine (come osservato nel caso di schede grafiche Intel). Ho quindi riprovato quel comando in una normale sessione grafica, ma lì il risultato era negativo: ancora un freeze del sistema e conseguente reset. Un po' scoraggiato ma tutt'altro che rassegnato, ho ripreso a cercare informazioni su internet, questa volta riguardanti direttamente il mio tipo di portatile, fino a trovare questo sintetico ma utilissimo wiki in cui si osserva che per far funzionare il suspend to ram sull'Extensa 5620 è prima necessario scaricare dal kernel il modulo psmouse (il driver per i mouse PS/2). In questo modo ho osservato che effettivamente la cosa funzionava; non restava altro che automatizzare il tutto, modificando i file di configurazione dei servizi di sospensione/ibernazione affinché bastasse un click sull'apposita voce del menu di KLaptop per mandare il notebook in stop. Ancora una volta mi sono tornate utilissime le pagine di manuale del sistema, in particolare quella del file hibernate.conf (digitate man hibernate.conf da terminale), ed i commenti presenti nei file della directory /etc/hibernate/. Per ottenere il comportamento desiderato, ho inserito le seguenti opzioni in testa al file /etc/hibernate/ram.conf:

USuspendRamForce yes # per l'opzione -f a s2ram

USuspendRamAcpiSleep 3 # per l'opzione -a3 a s2ram

UnloadModules psmouse # per scaricare psmouse prima della sospensione

LoadModules auto # per ricaricare al resume i moduli precedentemente scaricati

Fatto questo, la funzione di sospensione su ram sembra funzionare perfettamente! :-)

Ciao da Gica

Update: le stesse opzioni che ho citato nell'articolo sono già presenti nel file /etc/hibernate/ususpend-ram.conf; quindi, per attivarle, basta decommentarle ;-)

Update2: ho reinstallato il sistema da zero, e pur reimpostando le suddette opzioni il suspend to ram non funziona come si deve. Forse dimentico qualcosa, o forse c'è qualcosa che non va col mio portatile :-(

This is actually one of the greater achievements , especially considering this was impossible in Ubuntu Gutsy, Mint Daryna and probably pretty much any other recent Linux distro using one of the newer SLAB enabled kernels together with the ATI propritary 'fglrx' driver.

This is the steps involved:

- First , you should get uswsusp installed which will bring you s2ram. Unfortunately, in the official uswsusp the gurus decided to remove s2ram. So we will bring it in from this repository instead (add to /etc/apt/sources.list):

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

Then type:

# sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install uswsusp

Now off to edit /etc/gdm/gdm.conf ... probably not the right way to do things, but hey - it works.

Edit the line reading "SuspendCommand=/usr/sbin/pm-suspend" , adding the --force flag to it so it will loke like "SuspendCommand=/usr/sbin/pm-suspend --force".

You should now be able to respond/resume using fn+f4 or the gnome "power" button.

Unfortunately, upon resume my system suffered from two annoyances:

1. WLAN connection broken

2. X session broken (I was back at the login screen and gnome was restarted)

The first problem is related to the Intel 3945 restricted driver. The fix was to edit /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/10NetworkManager. In the function "suspend_nm()" comment out the dbus-send stuff and put "rmmod iwl3945". In function "resume_nm()" again comment out dbus-send and put "modprobe iwl3945".

The second problem is , as far as my understanding goes, related to virtual terminal changes taking place during  suspend locking ... ahem ... edit /usr/lib/pm-utils/functions and comment out all lines starting with chvt. Hurray , finally resume/suspend works as it is supposed to.

BTW ... hibernation doesn't work (what did you expect .. ?) , but I am probably not going to dig into that since I dont use it.

Most people need hibernation for their laptops.
step is to install a tool called «uswsusp»

sudo apt-get install uswsusp

And by typing the below command you check if the suspend function works now....
sudo s2ram
Same goes for hibernation

sudo s2disk

Now once this is done, and all of the above commands work, they can be replaced with the old non-working commands that come with ubuntu.

But attention, before editing the system files, always make sure you back up the files in case something goes completely wrong.

sudo cp /usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-suspend-linux /usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-suspend-linux.bak

sudo cp /usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-hibernate-linux /usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-hibernate-linux.bak

2. step is to replace the old commands with the new commands in

hal-system-power-suspend-linux

sudo nano /usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-suspend-linux

paste the following:

#!/bin/sh
/sbin/s2ram --force

hal-system-power-hibernate-linux

paste the following again:

#!/bin/sh
/sbin/s2disk

Good Luck, let me know if you come across any problems!

I recently got a new Toshiba Satellite A135-S2356, on which I installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. Below I will discuss several issues involved in configuring Ubuntu on the laptop. Unfortunately, I was not able to configure everything to my complete satisfaction. In those cases, I will detail as much as I know about the issue and will update this post as I learn more.

To configure the touchpad you need install an application such as gsynaptics. (On KDE you may want to use a different application, such as ksynaptics.) gsynatpics can be installed using the Synaptic Package Manager. After installing gsynaptics, edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and look for an entry that starts:

Section "InputDevice"

        Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"

Make sure that the following option is listed under that entry:

Option          "SHMConfig"     "on"

If you do modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf, you'll need to restart the X-server for the changes to take effect. You can do this by rebooting or pressing ctrl-alt-backspace.

Sound is the most frustrating part of configuring this laptop. The Toshiba Satellite A135-S2356 uses the ATI SB450 HDA sound card. Apparently the SB450 has worked off and on at various stages of Ubuntu's life cycle over the past few years. Its pretty frustrating that it reportedly worked in Ubuntu 6.10 but is broken again in Ubuntu 7.04. Its not clear to me if the problem lies in the kernel or with ALSA. At any rate, I have figured out how to get the sound card working, but with one giant quirk. When headphones are plugged in, the sound continues to emit from the laptop's internal speakers, essentially defeating the point of headphones. To get to this point, you need to edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base, and add the following line to the end of it:

options snd-hda-intel probe_mask=8 model=3stack

After doing so, the easiest next step is to reboot, that way the change will take effect. I have tried recompiling the alsa drivers, but that did not fix the speaker-headphone problem. In addition, it does not appear that this problem is a very high priority issue. Hopefully that will change, as I and many others require music while working and often work in environments where externally audible sound is unacceptable. I will continue to monitor the situation and will update this blog if I figure out how to make the speakers mute when headphones are plugged in. If anyone reading this blog knows how to fix the speaker-headphone situation, please post a comment.

I have posted a solution to get the headphones to mute, here.

Restricted drivers exist for the ATI graphics card in the laptop; however, I've found that when enabled, the screen goes black when ever you log out of Ubuntu. Consequently you have to reboot. So, if you're the only person that uses the laptop, then those drivers are probably OK to use. On the other hand, if you're not doing anything graphically intensive, you probably don't need to worry about using them. I have not extensively looked into recompiling the kernel to fix the black screen problem.

The laptop does not seem to properly wake from hibernate and sleep, using the default power management scheme. I was able to fix the problem by changing the default power management scheme with the steps below. (Note, I am still testing this new scheme.)

1. Install uswsusp using the Synaptic Package Manager.
2. Test uswsusp. To test hibernate, execute sudo s2disk. To test sleep, execute sudo s2ram -f. You must use the -f option because the A135-S2356 is not in the whitelist of supported laptops for s2ram. However, it seemed to work fine for me. For more information about s2ram, go to http://en.opensuse.org/S2ram.
3. The default power management scripts have a certain order in which they look for commands that put your computer into hibernation or to sleep. The first thing they look for is pmi. Unfortunately, you can not remove pmi from you system because of the way certain package dependencies are organized. However, you can rename pmi so that the power management scripts can't find it. If you renamed pmi using a move command, it would simply reappear the next time it was updated on the system. What you can do instead is to rename in a way that lets the packagemanagment system know it was renamed. That can be done with the following command:

   sudo dpkg-divert --rename --divert /usr/sbin/pmi-disabled /usr/sbin/pmi

   Now, power management will find s2disk and s2ram instead of pmi. Note, if you have installed other power management tools, you may have to remove them or similarly rename them.

4. Another issue is that we need the power management execute s2ram -f, not just s2ram. In order to do that, we mv s2ram similarly to how we moved pmi.

   sudo dpkg-divert --rename --divert /sbin/s2ram-install /sbin/s2ram

   After moving s2ram, we create a new s2ram that calls the renamed s2ram with the appropriate flags. That can be accomplished with the following two commands:

   sudo echo "/sbin/s2ram-install -f" > /sbin/s2ram

   sudo chmod 755 /sbin/s2ram

5. Note, because we used dpkg-divert to rename s2ram, it will still get updated properly.

The Toshiba function keys can be used to adjust brightness, mute/unmute the audio, etc. I have not yet figured this one out. However, I believe the solution is use fnfx, which can be installed using the Synaptic Package Manager. Unfortunately, in order for fnfx to work, the kernel must be compiled with Toshiba support. In particular, it requires that CONFIG_ACPI and CONFIG_ACPI_TOSHIBA are defined in the kernel configuration. Toshiba support seems to be missing in the kernel that Ubuntu supplies. Thus, I believe it is necessary to recompile the kernel. If you're reading this and you know where to download current versions of the kernel compiled with Toshiba support, please post a comment.

Although I've been disappointed with Ubuntu's sound support, I have been impressed with its wireless support. The wireless just worked! One addition I like to make to the wireless is to make OpenDNS the default DNS provider. I do this because some ISPs have not yet figured out how to setup fast and reliable DNS. In order to make OpenDNS your default DNS server for your wireless, add the following line to /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf, and then reboot:

prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220;

Because the headphones do not work properly, I am forced to use an external music player. Currently I am using an ipod. Instructions can be found at http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9266, for using your ipod with Ubuntu. Personally, I have chosen to use gtkpod to manage my ipod. In addition, if you're sick of Rhythmbox starting whenever you attach your ipod to your laptop, you can fix that by launching gconf-editor and modifying the settings under desktop -> gnome -> volume_manager. If found that particular piece of advice here.