How to use a terabyte of RAM [LWN.net]

How to use a terabyte of RAM

Posted Mar 13, 2008 15:49 UTC (Thu) by landley (subscriber, #6789)
Parent article: How to use a terabyte of RAM

When I suspend/resume my laptop (A Dell Inspiron E1505 that came pre-installed with Ubuntu,
since upgraded to x86-64 Kubuntu 7.10), about 10% of the time the keyboard and touchpad are
dead when it comes back.  The rest of the system is still working fine; if I press the power
button the "log out/suspend/hibernate/restart/turn off" dialog comes up (useless if I have no
mouse and keyboard), and if I plug in a USB mouse or USB keyboard I can use the system
normally.  (And if I suspend and resume it again via said USB peripherals, the
keyboard/touchpad controller usually revives itself when it comes back.)

If I don't happen to be carrying USB peripherals around with me, the only thing I can do is
hold the darn power button down until it hard powers off, and then reboot it.  I wind up doing
this, on average, about twice a month.

So there _is_ more to life than just trusting your battery...

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How to use a terabyte of RAM

Posted Mar 13, 2008 17:56 UTC (Thu) by Hawke (subscriber, #6978) [Link]

You could set it so that the system doesn't ask what to do, but instead suspends immediately
when you press the power button. (system -> preferences -> power management, general tab,
"when the power button is pressed: suspend").

Alternatively, if you have a suspend key on your keyboard, that might be handled by the BIOS
instead of the OS, and might trigger a suspend event.

How to use a terabyte of RAM

Posted Mar 13, 2008 20:48 UTC (Thu) by landley (subscriber, #6789) [Link]

Those instructions seem to be for gnome, and I'm using kde (without 
kpowersave installed, which I'm reluctant to install due to the "ubuntu 
laptop disks eating themselves after 6 months if you don't "hdparm -B 
255 /dev/sda" them.  (See 
http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/forums.asp?s=2&c=16&t... for details.)

However, all I had to do was edit /etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh and replace the 
call to /usr/bin/dcop with a call to /etc/acpi/sleep.sh.

I'm aware this is probably not the _approved_ way of doing this, but as 
with most "chainsaw, shotgun, and duct tape" solutions, it works just 
fine for me...

How to use a terabyte of RAM

Posted Mar 15, 2008 20:05 UTC (Sat) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]

"So there _is_ more to life than just trusting your battery..."

I suggest that you do not design your Dell inspiron laptop into a mission critical transaction
processing system.  Or that if you do, you should consider avoiding sleep state :-)