Ibook sleep flakiness, solved?

Saturday, September 24th, 2005

I wrote earlier about the difficulties of getting my ibook to sleep while running Yellowdog linux. A laptop without reliable power management is not terribly useful. I declared victory after randomly upgrading gnome packages. Well, “victory” was probably not the right word. About 1 in 5 times that I woke up the ibook, it would crash some component of X windows and only a ctrl-alt-backspace restart of X would bring it back to life. That is hardly much better than a full reboot everytime I open the machine.

Random package upgrades comes to rescue again. I just happened to be grovelling through the yellowdog update mirrors (ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/yellowdog/updates) when I noticed that there were two different directories that looked like they could be read by yum. I had been using yum to check for updates using an url in the /yellowdog/yum directory instead of the /yellowdog/updates directory. The result was that I never saw the updates that apparently appeared in July.

I should have been swearing at Yellowdog, but instead, I was overjoyed that I might get some much needed bugfix love. I did a full yum -download-only update, and then yum updated for a few packages at a time. I still don’t trust those new-fangled auto-package-update-doohickeys. (Look to the heavens and pause for rant from brasey about how package management systems are fundamentally flawed and Gentoo is a dessert topping AND a floor wax.)

I have a hunch that the best part of the upgrade process was that I got apmd-3.0.2-22 which deleted pmud. But it could have been very good to also get hotplug-2004_04_01 and procps-3.2.0 and pcmcia-cs-3.2.7.

There have only been about 5 chances for the ibook to wake from sleep since this round of updates, but it has woken up like a champ each time. I’ve got “a good feeling about this”. It even seems to wake up faster. And the keyboard is a little springier now, and my radio gets better reception too.

Monday, March 21st, 2005

Having exhausted the documentation available for getting sleep to work under Yellowdog 4.0.1 on an iBook 500MHz G3, I started considering other distros. Ubuntu and Fedora seemed to have the best documentation and active support lists. The install looks rougher on Fedora, but I’ve always wanted to try out Fedora core and see what it looks like.

While waiting for Fedora core to download to my server, I thought I’d keep poking at the Yellowdog installation to see what happened. First, I wanted to see what the gnome desktop looked like. The install I did left me with a KDE desktop. I couldn’t get the normal CD install to work to add gnome, so I started doing a “yum install x” for each rpm that had the word “gnome” in it. Eventually, I got the magic combination of packages that allowed me to select a Gnome desktop when logging into X.

Then I put the machine to sleep and woke it up the next morning. It worked. I was stunned. All I did was add gnome packages and their dependencies.

Well, now my iBook is sleeping appropriately and I can move onto other things, like the missing /proc/bus/usb.