One of the areas of interest if you run Linux on a laptop is the ability for said laptop to suspend. Here is the scenario. Person at work wants to leave work. He is tired of being at work and wants to not be at work any longer. He whimpers, “I wanna go home”. He packs up the superfluous work still not done because he works for a startup and heads home. He merely closed the lid on his purring Linux laptop.
The way I understand this is there are two possibilities for power management. One is old and one is new. One has been around forever it seems but its still called Advanced. The other is called with a group of initials like ACPI. One is simple and one has so many damned values that you never know what it takes to really use it on Linux. On Windows XP it just works and laptops suspend, come back; with alacrity.
My laptop is about 4 years of age now so iif it were running Windows, it would have gone over its life expectancy. Not so on Linux. Linux extends the life expectancy of old hardware by years. That is a good thing ™. It saves money and frustration. But there is still this power management thing that bedevils and make infants sometimes of us all. Oftentimes on this Inspiron 4100 it works like a charm. I close the lid, it powers down. I open the lid it powers up. That may be an ideal scenario. It works this way about 90% of the time. The other 10% it gets me. It blinks its lights at me. The screen is there but no one else is at home.
Its the reality with portable computing I think. ACPI fares no better for me. My thinkpad on ACPI works sometimes and other times it does not. But when it runs XP, it all works.
So my main rant here is that we need to have reputable power management for portable/mobile systems. It should not require arcane spells and midnight kernel compiles. It should just f’ing work. These are modern operating systems and APM is old. What is the deal? Then there is this thing called an APIC and a local APIC. Not to be confused with ACPI.
Geez… Lets just make it all even more complex.
