Hi Alex, There are 3 different suspend-to-disk (hibernate) implementations out there.
swsusp is part of mainline 2.6 kernel, but is not turned on in the default set of compile options and has apparently caused the Debian maintainers sufficient problems that they are now disabling it. pmdisk is a fork of swsusp and also in mainline 2.6 kernel but in the process of being merged back into swsusp and is similarly not compiled into the debian kernels swsusp2 also known as suspend2 and software-suspend2 is a new implementation that currently requires patching and recompiling your kernel. The deb file you installed from their site only contains the script to actually trigger the hibernation and not the kernel patches to make it happen. The maintainers of suspend2 hope to get it into the mainline kernel Real Soon Now, but they've been saying that for over a year. Their patches are massive against the current kernel and have raised some objections from the kernel gurus. The patches are being broken down into smaller useful-on-their-own chunks and some are starting to be incorporated into the kernel and the stability of swsusp2 is improving. But don't necessarily expect it all to make it into the mainline kernel any time soon. All 3 implementations have problems... if the work for you then stick to them and don't change anything... if they don't work for you at the moment, then they probably never will. swsusp2 is probably the most likely to work as it doesn't require ACPI control to work, but it is also probably the least tested at this stage and has many experimental features still. Support for initrd is only just starting to be incorporated and there are still many discussions on the devel mailing list about trashed ext3 or xfs etc partitions. Your data is not necessarily safe with swsusp2. swsusp and pmdisk do not support highmem (> 830-ish MB RAM) and also have bugs, some of which can't be fixed as they are a fundamental limitation of the current kernel and driver model. The swsusp2 team is trying to get around these limitations, but that requires many invasive changes to the kernel. I have never managed to get any of these to work on my laptop (1GB RAM)... swsusp2 is approaching the stability I require, so I might have another go at it in a few months' time and see if I can get it working this time. Regarding the "Hibernate" etc buttons in KDE, these only work if your system is already configured to do something intelligent with them: e.g. the hibernate button is just a graphical way of triggering whatever hibernate function you have working for you (e.g. swsusp2). The sleep mode relies on ACPI sleep working, which it does on a small fraction of laptops, but unfortunately not mine either (HP/Compaq are not being very linux friendly!) Good luck! Stuart -- Stuart Prescott www.nanoNANOnano.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
