[gpm] Is g-p-m (or pm-suspend) supposed to work on a desktop PC?

["Paul Johnson" <pauljohn32 gmail com>]

In our computer lab, we have a bunch of Dell Optiplex 280 pc's that
are 1 year old.  They have 3.2 GH pentium processors (FC5 installs an
SMP kernel by default) with ATI x300 video drivers.  There is one SATA
drive in each PC.  FC5 installed the g-p-m program and I was a little
surprised, because I thought that was just for laptops.  But these
machines are hot as hell all the time and so I considered the idea
that suspend to ram overnight might cool things off a little bit.  I'm
willing to try anthing, actually, but the CPU speed is not scalable...

Anyway, I tried the suspend in the gnome menu and the system did
suspend and the power button goes slowly on and off, and when I push
the button, the video does wake up and I can type in any open x
terminals.  however, no programs will run.  Commands like "/sbin/fdisk
/dev/sda" just return "command not found." The hard disk appears not
to be mounted anymore.

By coincidence, a friend mentioned to me tha the 2.6.16 kernels
included a SATA patch that allowed the used of hdparm commands on SATA
drives. So I tested that out.  I am able to set the power management
settings and put the hard disk into standby mode. (don't know yet if
that makes it cooler).  I am also able to put the disk into sleep
mode, but it never wakes up.  And while the disk is still sleeping,
the system behaves just like it did after the failed restart after
pm-suspend.

So then I wondered, maybe I should not try to do this at all with a
desktop PC.  Maybe g-p-m is intended only for laptops?  Since FC5
installs wireless tools on systems that have no wireless devices, and
lots of other unneeded crap, I can't rule out the possibility that
g-p-m is there by mistake, not intention.

--
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas