I recently got a new work laptop: a very nice Thinkpad T43p to replace my older T30. My first act, as usual, was to wipe the preinstalled Windows and put Gentoo Linux on it. For the most part, things went smoothly, but I had to fight to get it to sleep properly.
There is a lot of useful information on getting Linux to work on Thinkpads, and for the most part things just work, so I won’t go in details. But I had trouble to get power management to work properly. With both APM and ACPI, it would suspend, but it would not come back to life properly. Part of the problem seems to be that the T43p has a SATA disk, and the SATA suspend is broken in the latest Linux kernels. Unfortunately, even with the patch provided by Jens Axboe, it did not work properly.
In the end, I managed to get suspend-to-disk (hibernate) to work properly, by using Suspend2. With Gentoo, it was fairly easy:
- emerge suspend2-sources
- compile the kernel, as per these instructions.
- emerge hibernate-script
- edit /etc/hibernate/hibernate.conf, and add resume2=swap:/dev/sda2 to my GRUB kernel line (/dev/sda2 is my swap partition).
And it works! It hibernates and comes back to life properly.
Useful links:
- How to make ACPI work on ThinkWiki, a great site for information about Linux on Thinkpads.
- The Gentoo Power management guide.
- Software Suspend 2 home page.