SUSE LINUX on Dell Inspiron 8600

Good news first: Suspend to Disk works under 9.1, but you mustn't use the nVIDIA driver then. Standby on the other side doesn't (at least for me).

SuSE Linux 9.1 comes with kernel 2.6 and a new powermanagement daemon, the powersaved. This means, that there is no acpid and cpufreqd anymore, but only one daemon. A least for me, this one works good. It seems, that the running-from-battery times are even better, than under 9.0.

Setting up Suspend

Let's go on step-by-step:

1. After the initial installation there shoud be an applet on the KDE panel called kpowersave. Right-clicking on this applet shows you a menue, but you can't choose Suspend or Standby. Theese functions are disabled by default, as ACPI under Linux isn't too stable :-(
2. To enable Suspend, you have to edit the /etc/powersave.conf file. In line 141 change POWERSAVED_DISABLE_USER_SUSPEND=yes to POWERSAVED_DISABLE_USER_SUSPEND=no. To edit the file within the KDE editor kate, run the following command:
   kdesu kate /etc/powersave.conf.
3. You could now already send your Computer to deep sleep, but belive me, it won't wake up any more, so don't hurry. Let's finish the next step first :-)
4. There are some kernel-modules loaded, which are blocking the powermanagement system unloading them. As unloading these modules is necessary for suspend, we have to put them on a blacklist.
5. Still in the editor kate open the file /etc/hotplug/blacklist and add the following lines to the end of the file:
   
   # POWERSAVE
   intel_agp
   intel-agp
   
   These modules are used by agpgart and are blocking the wakeup from suspend.
6. Save also this file, close the editor and restart your computer. The restart is neccessary as the blacklisted kernel module ist still loaded. After the reboot, check whether the blacklisted modules are loaded. The following command shouldn't show you any result:
   
   /sbin/lsmod | grep agp
   
   
7. If OK, click with the right mousebutton on the kpowersave icon and choose Suspend. The screen becomes black and you can see some messages from the powersave daemon. After some seconds (depends on the amount of memory, and the applications you are running), the computer shuts down. The last message you can probably see is "Writing pages to Swap", then .................................................................
   ...............................................................................................
   ..................................................................................
8. If you turn your computer on, the Grub-Bootscreen will appear as usual. Choose the same kernel / configuration, which you used for suspend. The system starts and the screen becomes black again. Some messages appear and after "Waiting for DMAs to settle down" (please be patient, some time it lasts longer then 1 minute) the system will start.

If something goes wrong

Using the YaST Power-Management module

Have fun!