Tolero’s tech notes

Why do I personally hate proprietary drivers? I have a well featured laptop Asus W3V which is equiped with ATI mobility radeon X600 video card, and Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG network card. Both require a closed source proprietary drivers to work (fglrx, ipw2200). Both brings a headache in use. The whole pain for both is bugs.

My Asus supports ACPI as well, but I’am unable to use it freely with the proprietary drivers. The problem is with suspend function. It doesn’t work perfectly: neither ram nor hdd. The suspend to ram and suspend to disk goes well only in one way - to sleep. The way back is not well. I’am using ubuntu edgy (previously used dapper) which comes with pre-builded, easy installable, proprietary drivers packages. To be fair, I also tryed patched suspend 2 kernel, which gaved the same picture.

Resume from suspend to ram leaves the screen black, and the computer doesn’t respond to any actions (even Ctrl+Alt+F1 or Ctrl+Alt+Backspace). If the machine was suspended in a text mode, it will resume, but switch to X server will halt it. This problem came with the fglrx drivers since spring of 2006. Everything works well on the debian sarge with the old drivers. But the old drivers are not possible to setup onto the new ubuntu kernel, it is unable to compile the kernel module.

The resume from hard disk sleep causes ipw drivers failure, and the wireless network doesn’t work until reboot.

Update 29-jan-2007: there is a solution to restore a suspend to ram! It is working with suspend 2 patches and hibernate-ram script. Just tweak a /etc/hibernate/ram.conf file, and comment all lines containing a vbetool occurence. Also uncomment, or add RadeonTool yes to the end of the script. Mine script now look like this:

TryMethod ususpend-ram.conf
TryMethod sysfs-ram.conf
#EnableVbetool yes
#VbetoolPost yes
RadeonTool yes