Tech Life of Recht

Last week, we had some of the local drugheads come into the office at night, and they ran off with my laptop, and 6 other laptops. I had a trusty Lenovo Thinkpad z61m with Ubuntu (and xmonad, of course), which is now gone, together with whatever I had on it. Naturally, I didn’t have backup of everything, but at least all of my code was checked into Subversion, so the most critical I’m missing now are some course material.
Luckily, it didn’t take long before we got permission to go out and buy some new laptops (this is one of the great things when you’re working for a small company: no company procedures which have to be followed). We were told that we should probably go for a IBM, HP or Apple laptop. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I buy new hardware, I can’t just decide. It takes a couple of days (or even weeks), so deciding what to buy and live with for the next couple of years in half an hour certainly wasn’t easy. In the end, I got a MacBook Pro with a 15″ display – but only after confirming that it could run Linux, in case OS X got on my nerves too much.
Having lived with xmonad for a couple of months, it didn’t take long before I decided that OS X might be pretty nice, but there’s just too much focus on the looks, so I installed rEFIt, downloaded the new Ubuntu 7.10 and installed it.

I had anticipated some problems installing, as some of the experience reports on the net indicated that some things might go wrong, but that didn’t really happen. Everything just installed ™ – almost: The wireless driver had to be compiled from Subversion. Other than that, everything works: X, accellerated graphics, Xinerama/TwinView, sound, webcam, temp. sensors, keyboard lights, and touchpad with different zones. Only two things aren’t working: The remote control and suspend to ram.
I can live without the remote control (actually, I can’t really imagine what I should use it for if it worked), but the missing software suspend is not exactly optimal. It doesn’t help that it’s not consistent: Sometimes it can actually suspend and resume correctly. Using ‘pm-suspend –quirk-post-vbe’ seems to increase the number of times it works.
At other times, it doesn’t suspend. Sometimes, it just blanks the screen, and nothing else happend. It can also switch to console with a blinking cursor, and then nothing else happend. Sometimes bliking the cursor is so hard it has to turn on the fans. No matter what, a cold boot is the only way forward.
If it manages to suspend, resume often fails. When this happens, the disk turns on, but the screen doesn’t, and there’s no response to any keypresses. Again, cold boot is the way forward.
I haven’t managed to identify why software suspend doesn’t work. The only hint I have is that if the network cable is unplugged when I suspend, it seems to suspend successfully more often than else. Acpid should unload the network drivers before suspend, so I can’t see why this has anything to do with it. I’m hoping a kernel upgrade will fix it at some point.