I have an older laptop, which I brought back out of storage for fun and to keep it updated. It runs Debian Lenny, so it’s a pretty stable machine, and very handy. A recent purchase of a new battery gives me ~2.5 hours of time with it, which isn’t bad for a laptop from Fall 2002.
Anyways, with running Linux, sometimes you’ll run into small glitches which become slight annoyances when you realize how life could be. In the case of our HP Mini – I know suspend to RAM works in the latest kernels, and my older laptop supports ACPI. So, I ventured to solve the suspend to RAM problem. I found that after suspending, upon resume, the laptop would appear alive, but only the backlight would be on. No graphics, no text, nothing. I could SSH into it, and noticed that an XOrg process was eating the CPU. After researching a bit of history on XOrg and nVidia, I found a forum post noting that this particular user had encountered success by turning off nVidia’s AGP handling. Upon testing the following config (/etc/X11/xorg.conf – In the ‘Device’ or ‘Screen’ section)
Option "NvAGP" "0"
I found I could suspend, and resume with ease. What a great community behind these types of things.