After a brief absence, our hero returns from the land of suspend and software suspend and apm and acpi. He is badly bruised but nonetheless happy and challenged.
My older Dell Inspiron 4100 seems to all work under Linux these days and perhapts its gotten too old because suddenly now I have little suspend issues which I never had under a 2.4 kernel. Most of the time, I close the lid on the laptop, apm kicks in and when I get home all is fine. A few times though, there are these little lock icons on the top of the keyboard area by the power button that get me. All three are blinking madly at me and the laptop will not come back. The icons have a lock on them. What in hell are they anyways? They conquer me about 1 time out of 20 or so. Why blink at me at all I wonder.
I don’t run some smancy window manager or so-called desktop environment. I still run WindowMaker because I can and its complex enough for me; but the whole power management or perhaps (mis)management thing gets me. I like to have 100% functionality. If I suspend that means I do not want to reboot. It means come on back when I open the lid doggone it!
I don’t recall how XP ran on this laptop but perhaps all my laptops are too old for this stuff. I got this dell laptop in 2001. Five years old now. Goodness! How time flies. When the laptop was like 2 years old, Linux just worked on it. APM, Sound, networking. I was in heaven. I could close and open the lid, have the screen back without the little lock icons blinking madly at me. What are they anyways? Does anyone know?
Anyways, now it runs a 2.6.15 kernel with X.org and APM compiled in as a module. I am 95% there with things. But suddenly after years of great performance, little things start bugging me. APM, ACPI… Someone once told me that ACPI stood for “Another Crummy Proprietary Interface”. I don’t get ACPI at all; but I do know that my T23 likes it and my Inspiron does not. Come on guys! Can’t we all just get along? Laptops are… portable. You should be able to shut the lid and open the lid and it all just works.
Perhaps it does in other worlds. And most of the time it does in this one. I’d like a better than “most” experience though. I’ll just go back to a 2.4 kernel since it seems to actually work better at most things. But… 2.6 rocks the boat on USB stuff. I am in desperate love with USB gadgets that all work now.
Oh well, I spent my blog-time discussing my little travails but perhaps everyone with a laptop has similar ones… Laptops perhaps by their very nature offer a mix of ease of use and irritation.
