Fedora 8 Suspension - The Practical Administrator

I’ve previously mentioned that I use Fedora 8 on my laptop at home. It is a Core 2 Duo Dell with a GeForceGo 7300. Originally, it had Vista Home Premium, and I really did give Vista a chance (for almost 8 months!!), but I just like linux more. I do still have to go back to Vista on the (extremely) rare occasion I need bluetooth support. For some reason I can’t get the integrated bluetooth modem to work with Fedora. The GeForce Go has caused me nothing but problems. Nvidia’s normal drivers won’t work with the Go series from Dell, I have to get the drivers directly from Dell…and they are flaky.

Anyway, I recently reloaded my laptop and let it update everything to the newest available. Unfortunately, at some point, suspend stopped working. I’m not sure when it was (it applied ~ 300 updates), but it stopped. Well, it didn’t exactly stop working…it still suspends, once, after which the monitor refuses to work. I can still ssh in, and everything seems to be functioning normally, but the monitor doesn’t work. Which makes a laptop very useless.

So, since I’ve reloaded linux a number of times, and it seems each time I forget what I did to fix it, I’m documenting it for myself, and posterity.

After some digging, I came across Clemson University’s Linux Initiative webpage. In one of their articles they describe turning off the quirks for the monitor when it’s suspending.

This got me thinking/experimenting and I found the solution. By editing the file /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/20-video-quirk-pm-dell.fdi and changing the portion for my laptop (a Dell E1505, which is also known as a Dell 6400), suspend/resume works again.

Here is the portion I edited. I simply commented out the old portion:

      &lt;!-- Dell XPS M1330, OptiPlex GX520 (desktop with intel) 
           MM061 = Inspiron E1505 or/and 6400 --&gt;
      &lt;match key=&quot;system.hardware.product&quot; contains_outof=&quot;XPS M1330;OptiPlex GX520;MM061&quot;&gt;
        &lt;!--&lt;merge key=&quot;power_management.quirk.vbe_post&quot; type=&quot;bool&quot;&gt;true&lt;/merge&gt;
        &lt;merge key=&quot;power_management.quirk.vbemode_restore&quot; type=&quot;bool&quot;&gt;true&lt;/merge&gt;--&gt;
        &lt;match key=&quot;info.linux.driver&quot; string=&quot;nvidia&quot;&gt;
          &lt;merge key=&quot;power_management.quirk.none&quot; type=&quot;bool&quot;&gt;true&lt;/merge&gt;
        &lt;/match&gt;
      &lt;/match&gt;

<!-- Dell XPS M1330, OptiPlex GX520 (desktop with intel)

MM061 = Inspiron E1505 or/and 6400 -->

<!--<merge key="power_management.quirk.vbe_post" type="bool">true</merge>

</match>

So there, I no longer have to scour the internet to remember how I fixed it last time.

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