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

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 23:25 -0500, Paul Johnson wrote:

Sorry for delay, just got back...

> 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...

Yes, g-p-m should be used on desktops too, as it can be used with UPS's
or wireless mice, and also handles DPMS screen power management.

> 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

Is that using the proprietary ati drivers or the free ones? 

>  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.

I think (kernel issue) SATA drives could be the issue here. Have you got
any more details or dmesg output after suspend please.

> 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.

You need g-p-m to do other stuff, see above. The auto-suspend stuff is
just as valid for desktops as laptops IMO.

Richard.