Ubuntu Hardy Heron beta on Thinkpad T60p

If you are anything like me you like your laptop to be able to suspend … unfortunately this has not been trivial with the current crop of stable linux distributions, at least not if you at the same time has a laptop with ATI graphic adapter and use the propritary fglrx driver.

However, the solution is right at hand with the new Hardy Heron release of Ubuntu. Unfortunately things does not work out of the box and what is worse, it is close to impossible to dig up the right solution. But here it is:

1. Install Hardy beta

2. Oh darn … restricted modules says ATI driver not in use , but it is ticked ?? WTF … well , that doesnt stop us:

# sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx

Go back to restricted modules and now you can tick it on and do the install (that didnt make anything work what did you expect…)

3. reboot

4. At this point I think my system downloaded around 200 patches , so I suggest you do the same ..

5.  Start envy – mine failed on install attempt , so went on to “manual installation” in the menu… that seemed to work

6.  Whatever happens now are a little unclear … either it works or it doesnt. You could always

# sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

and make sure that you have things like this:

Section “Module”
Load  “glx”
Load  “dri”
Load  “extmod”
EndSection
Section “Device”
Identifier      “Generic Video Card”
Driver          “fglrx”
Busid           “PCI:1:0:0″
Option          “VideoOverlay”  “on”
Option          “OpenGLOverlay” “off”
EndSection

Section “Extensions”
Option          “Composite”     “Enable”
EndSection

Section “ServerFlags”
Option          “AIGLX” “on”
Option          “Xinerama”      “off”
EndSection

7. If everything else fails  , or you get weird black lines in lower right corner, do the master magician trick of all times:

# sudo depmod -a

and reboot …

Putting the Thinkpad T60p to sleep in Ubuntu Hardy Heron beta

In my ever ongoing quest to get Ubuntu Hardy Heron beta to work on my beloved Thinkpad T60p, I finally managed to get suspend/resume working.

This is actually one of the greater achievements , especially considering this was impossible in Ubuntu Gutsy, Mint Daryna and probably pretty much any other recent Linux distro using one of the newer SLAB enabled kernels together with the ATI propritary ‘fglrx’ driver.

This is the steps involved:

- First , you should get uswsusp installed which will bring you s2ram. Unfortunately, in the official uswsusp the gurus decided to remove s2ram. So we will bring it in from this repository instead (add to /etc/apt/sources.list):

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

Then type:

# sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install uswsusp

Now off to edit /etc/gdm/gdm.conf … probably not the right way to do things, but hey – it works.

Edit the line reading “SuspendCommand=/usr/sbin/pm-suspend” , adding the –force flag to it so it will loke like “SuspendCommand=/usr/sbin/pm-suspend –force”.

You should now be able to respond/resume using fn+f4 or the gnome “power” button.

Unfortunately, upon resume my system suffered from two annoyances:

1. WLAN connection broken

2. X session broken (I was back at the login screen and gnome was restarted)

The first problem is related to the Intel 3945 restricted driver. The fix was to edit /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/10NetworkManager. In the function “suspend_nm()” comment out the dbus-send stuff and put “rmmod iwl3945″. In function “resume_nm()” again comment out dbus-send and put “modprobe iwl3945″.

The second problem is , as far as my understanding goes, related to virtual terminal changes taking place during  suspend locking … ahem … edit /usr/lib/pm-utils/functions and comment out all lines starting with chvt. Hurray , finally resume/suspend works as it is supposed to.

BTW … hibernation doesn’t work (what did you expect .. ?) , but I am probably not going to dig into that since I dont use it.

ping 127.0.0.1 > /dev/null

Nothing useful obviously … /leos