Software Suspend on old box with Ubuntu 9.10

Software suspend just didn't work on my old box, although hibernate did. So I had a go at fixing it. It didn't quite work, although I can now suspend. l made notes in case anyone else is having similar problems.



The first thing to try is:

$pm-is-supported --suspend ; echo $?

Which gives the answer 1, meaning 'not supported'.

Reboot and poke around the bios settings. Locate a box where you can change from ACPI1, to ACPI3, whatever that means. Changed it to ACPI3, which the BIOS describes as 'less stable'.

At that point the $ pm-is-supported --suspend ; echo $?

gives 0, meaning 'can do'.

Trying it gives a suspend all right, and it wakes up when the mouse is moved. Unfortunately the screen stays black and nothing will revive it.

Reboot and look at the pm-suspend log file

$ less /var/log/pm-suspend.log


Near the end, there's the following suspicious bit

/usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/99video resume suspend: Floating point exception
Trace/breakpoint trap
Trace/breakpoint trap
success.

It looks as though the video driver is failing to wake up properly.

Try installing the Nvidia drivers from System/Administration/Hardware Drivers.

Reboot, suddenly compiz is working, and everything seems fine.

Suspend works a treat!

Only problem now is that when I'm trying to finish off this blog post my computer slows to an unusable crawl!

It appears that Firefox (and only on the post-editing page of Blogger) is causing X to use 100% cpu.

Fortunately Epiphany seems to have no such problem. Which gets me this far.

I can kill compiz
$ pkill compiz
and start metacity instead
$ metacity
but the problem still seems to be there.

So it seems to be a conflict between Firefox and X and the NVIDIA driver.

And at this point I'm stuck.

I have a choice between being able to blog from Firefox (and something tells me that there may be more sites with this problem) and being able to do a suspend.

Sigh.