[gpm] Suddenly lost Suspend ability

[Ryan Hughes <ryan iheartryan com>]

Hi.  I'm using ubuntu 8.04, which has gnome-power-manager 2.22.1.  I'm 
running this on a Lenovo-branded Thinkpad R61.  I'm having sudden 
unexpected problems with my suspend/resume.

Things were working just fine for ~1yr.  That all changed about a week 
ago.  I can think of no particular event which precipitated it, except 
maybe that I booted into Windows and back.

Now, when I shut the lid (w/ no ac power), the screen goes blank but does 
not turn off.  The little "sleep" light fails to blink.  The fans never 
stop spinning.

When I open the computer back up, I see that the screen is blank but on, 
and the fans are spinning.  The screen remains blank, with a blinking 
cursor.
Apparently I'm on some lonely, forgotten VC.  I can use alt-f1-f6 to get 
to the other VCs or alt-f7 to get back to X.

I poked around in the syslog.

Jan  8 19:55:31 drawesome gnome-power-manager: (rjhughes) Suspending 
computer. Reason: The lid has been closed on battery power.
Jan  8 19:55:32 drawesome gnome-power-manager: (rjhughes) Resuming 
computer
Jan  8 19:55:43 drawesome gnome-power-manager: (rjhughes) GNOME 
interactive logout. Reason: The power button has been pressed.
Jan  8 19:56:37 drawesome syslogd 1.5.0#1ubuntu1: restart.


I ssh'ed in from another computer to watch what happened.  Here's how it 
went down:

I closed the lid.
I got both the suspend and then the resume messages.  That seems to be the 
crux of my problem here.

The ssh connection never broke.  I catted
/proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state and it said (correctly) that the lid was 
closed.  I opened the lid.  No new log messages were generated, but the 
state of /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state was changed to open.

I get the same behavior when I tell it to sleep by using the sleep button. 
Namely, both the suspend and resume log messages happen, and I'm dumped 
onto a blank text-mode VC with no interruption in the computer's services.


Finally, in order to check whether this was a hardware problem, I rebooted 
into windows, which had no problem suspending and resuming.

So, what sort of information should I obtain next?  OR, what sorts of 
actions can I take?

Thanks.

--Ryan