Testing Suspend/Resume on a XPS m1330
I recently unboxed my Dell XPS M1330, and of course replaced the default Vista Ultimate™ with Ubuntu Intrepid.
Everything was working fine, until I attempted to suspend: it failed to wake from its slumber. Hibernate had a similar problem, although in that case the system didn’t even attempt, returning to the gnome-screensaver immediately after switching to a tty.
I googled for a bit and came across a bugreport on Launchpad, which was currently in the “won’t fix” status pending testing of the new kernel. The bug hadn’t been touched in a while, so I decided hey, testing Jaunty should be easy, I’ll give it a whirl. Wrong.
The first problem was _getting_ Jaunty, my internet fails epicly and I don’t want to upgrade my main installation. I initially dismissed partitioning, because I didn’t want to risk data loss. I came upon LiveUSB: it would require burning a liveCD but did not cause me to have to change anything on my hard drive at all. That was a bust; the first flash drive I tried (brand new PNY 8gb), according to the BIOS, didn’t even have a valid boot partiton. My second drive was corrupted after the first failed resume, but at least it booted.
So, having exausted that option, I decided to see what I could do with the LiveCD itself. The helpful folks in #ubuntu-installer suggested using the “persistance” option in the boot command line which requires you to either create a loopmounted filesystem on a FAT disk (which I’ll pass on, thanks), or making the sole partition on the disk a ext(2,3)-formatted volume labled “home-rw”. This didn’t work on my SDHC 4GB card, nor did it work with my USB key. I’m back where I started.
In the end, I just enabled intrepid-propsed, upgraded to the new kernel that’s been in testing almost since the release, and my S/R problems went away. Oh well, I guess Jaunty testing will have to wait until after feature-freeze.