What do I need to have in order to get suspend to disk to work on a Desktop machine.
On my laptop (R40 Thinkpad) Ubuntu will suspend or hibernate perfectly. One suspends to disk and shuts down,the other suspends to ram and then puts the machine into a low power standby state. I always get the two mixed up.
I understand that I need some power management in my hardware to do the 2nd one but surely suspending to disk is purely a software thing ?
My Desktop is the most power hungry of the two machines I have running at home. I have now decided that rising energy costs and the environment outweigh my concerns of thermal cycling my hardware. However I would like to avoid full boots all the time because I tend to have a lot of stuff open on various virtual desktops, have virtual machines running in the background etc etc
I tried selecting hibernate from the Ubuntu/Gnome log off menu. The following things happened.
There was a brief flurry of disk activity I lost my (ethernet) network connection My keyboard (usb) stopped working but when I brought focus to a console using the (usb) mouse I found that the p key was repeating at the prompt.
From this state there was nothing I could do to cleanly bring the system
down. Even the front panel button (that usually starts halt on this machine) failed. In the end I had to prod reset.
Question 2
Assuming I can get this all to work, is there an easy way to produce a magic packet for "wake up on lan" from my other Linux box (that will be remaining switched on) to wake up the desktop from afar if I need it.