Weird Hibernation Issues
No, nothing to do with sleeping for a very long time, but weird things my Thinkpad does when it hibernates. For the most part hiberation works very well on my Thinkpad. I use the hardware supported one rather than the one built into Linux, but it does do a couple of odd things.
The first is that Firefox occassionaly (but not always!) dies during hibernation. I think I’ve narrowed it does to either Ajax apps running (some network connection getting killed, then killing the app?) or I’m using swap (more likely Firefox has been opened long enough that something else is the cause). It’s not really a problem because I use Tab Mix Plus, which can restore my session after a crash, but it is frustrating if you open a bunch of articles that you want to read on say a long train journey, only to find the browser is gone!
The other weird issue is that my fonts disappear from OpenOffice and Microsoft Office (running via Crossover Office after hiberation. This includes menu fonts and the fonts used in the document. All the spacing remains correct, just no text. It only happens to these two programs, everything else is fine. Restarting xfs doesn’t make a difference, the only way to fix it is to restart X. This problem is just bizarre.
If any one has any solutions to these problems, I’d love to hear them!
Update 1: It looks like the hibernation processes shuts down the network connection and all programs that depend on it. I don’t know if that’s a Gentoo specific thing. The only other process that isn’t running when the computer is turned back on is gconfd-2, but unfortunately starting it up doesn’t help with the font problem.
Update 2: The gconfd-2 thing was a red herring, it was started up by Firefox. Killing it doesn’t affect the fonts. I guess something in X is dying, which can only be fixed with a restart.
September 20th, 2006 at 7:48 pm
Surely that means you’re using APM, rather than ACPI. I didn’t think that was supported. But then you use Gentoo, so you get all the pain you deserve. Use suspend-to-mem. It works without any trouble. Suspend-to-disk has worked on my X30 before too.
September 21st, 2006 at 3:21 am
I’m using IBM’s built in hibernation, nothing to do with Linux what so ever, it’s all done in hardware. The Firefox thing has always been around, but the font thing is new, so it’s due to something I upgraded.
September 24th, 2006 at 9:42 pm
Oops…it looks like I was wrong, it does activate hibernate via APM. But I tried switching to ACPI and then suspend and hibernate stops working all together. I might have to give suspend-to-disk a go.