Suspend to disc with Dell Latitude D400 on Linux

I now have a Dell Latitude D400 for 1 month. This little (really small) computer is pretty nice to use, but it right now, it’s really hard to have suspend working on this kind of stuff. The main reason: it only support ACPI (no APM), and ACPI isn’t well supported by the Linux kernel.

I have tested several way to fix this issue. The only that’s working fine right now, is to use swsup. So to make it work:

  • install the latest 2.6.9 kernel (the 2.6.8 has a issue w/ agpart and drm)
  • in kernel select ‘ACPI -> sleep state’
  • and ‘ACPI -> swsup’
  • build the kernel
  • create a swap partition if you don’t have one (i resized a ntfs w/ qparted)
  • mkswap /dev/hda4 (for example)
  • add ‘resume=/dev/hda4′ in your boot prompt (in grub for example)

Now your system is ready. Reboot :) ..To put the the system in standby and dump the current state in the swap: echo 4 > /proc/acpi/sleep.

Next step simply bind the power button on this action. This is done w/ the acpid.

#!/bin/sh
# /etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh

# put the box in swsup mode
echo 4 > /proc/acpi/sleep

Beside the S2/S3 ACPI doesn’t work right now, swsup permit to have suspend to disk without too much trouble.



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2 thoughts on “Suspend to disc with Dell Latitude D400 on Linux

  1. It’s easy to map an ACPI lid event to execute the standby script.

    I just copied my_standby_script to /etc/acpi/standby and My /etc/acpi/events/lid has the following lines :

    # /etc/acpi/events/lid

    event=button[ /]lid

    action=/etc/acpi/my_standby_script

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