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.