On 15/01/11 11:14, Simon Royal wrote:
I find it odd that my 10 year old G3 500Mhz Mac can come back from sleep within seconds but my sons 2.2Ghz P4 laptop takes about 20 seconds to get back.
I had a ThinkPad 600 and 240x about a year ago and they just worked with sleep. Open the lid and it comes back on, sometimes faced with a log back in screen but it worked.
So why can I not get this R31 to behave in a similar way? Why would a 600 and 240x have better power down support than this R31?
If I press Fn+F4 it will go to sleep, but then coming back on takes a boot (bios splash, grub etc) and then you get the log back in screen.
It sounds like you are comparing suspend and hibernate. Using Hibernate on the R31 and your Son's machine and suspend on the Mac
Suspend keeps the memory contents in the memory which remains powered with the machine in a low power state (usually shown by a pulsing power light)
Resuming from this is pretty much instant because all the machine has to do is reinitialise the hardware a bit and of it goes. The downside is there is a finite time you can remain in suspend because it still drains the battery a bit and when the battery is completely discharged the suspended state is lost.
Hibernate writes the contents of memory out to a hibernation file (or in the case of Linux just to the swap partition) and powers the machine down completely. Then on power up this gets written back into RAM from disk. This takes longer (depending on the speed of your disk and how much physical ram you have) but has the advantage that the machine is to all intents and purposes fully powered off so you can remain in this state indefinitely.
Linux supports both states, but may only support one of them on your specific hardware so you may have to experiment. The fact that you are seeing a Bios POST screen usually signifies that you are in the Hibernate state not Suspend at the moment. You can change what happens when you close the lid in the power management settings, see if there is the option to suspend rather than hibernate there and give it a go.