Gentoo

I'm installing Gentoo on the laptop. I want to see whether I can get the power management features that are supposed to be so much more improved in 2.6.9 to work. It's suspend-to-disk that I want. The whole thing is a big hack though. When you suspend it writes the contents of the RAM to a compressed image on the swap partition, and then shuts down. Some programs can't handle this, so have to be unloaded from memory before suspending. The clock gets screwed up and so has to be re-synched when starting back up. When starting up again the system has to check that you don't boot a suspend-unaware version of the Kernel by faffing with Lilo... The list of ugly hacks goes on and on.

Besides all this I decided to give it a go. If I can get it working then it'll become my main OS on the laptop, and windows will be kept only for Buzz: The program I make music with.

I compiled in the power management stuff and set the Kernel to allow suspend-to-disk. Once I'd done this and rebooted etc I suddenly realised that I had NO idea how to invoke it. I went back into the Kernel config menu and took a look at the help for it. It suggests using swsusp to invoke it. Fair enough. Is swsusp installed? Is it fxxk. So then I started looking for the package that contained it. Eventually, after much faffing I found a package called hibernate-script that appeared to include it. I tried to install it and found it was masked because it was supposedly incompatible with my system.

In a fit of desperation I unmasked it and installed it. Tried running it, it crashed the Kernel. Tried a few ideas I found on various websites, such as

but that also simply crashed the Kernel.

Seemed to work, putting the computer into "standby" mode. Fine. Not quite suspend-to-disk, but it's a start. Start the computer up again and it crashes. Great.

In the end I tried applying the patches found at http://softwaresuspend.berlios.de/ but that didn't seem to help much either.

Anyway I've now found a document on the Gentoo website that explains how to set up a collection of other power saving mechanisms, so I'll set all that up and see what I can do from there.

The good thing is that it's like a breath of fresh air using Linux on the laptop. It had SuSE on there which Burt left on there, but I didn't really get on with SuSE. I didn't like Yast much, (it wouldn't let me upgrade to 2.6.9 OR install Fluxbox!) and it was all set up for Burt. I use a very specific setup, which revolves around Fluxbox and SuSE didn't seem to want to let me do things my way. Anyway, now Gentoo is on there it looks pretty much the same as my desktop, which is great. If I can just get the Power Management right I will be the envy of all the geeks in my lectures ;)

Right, now to get some lunch. I'm starving.