Hiberrnate, resume and restart issues in Ubuntu 10.04 : dell inspiron 1545

For those of you who are having problems with suspend and resume with your laptops using Ubuntu 10.04 here is a quick fix:

download and install uswsusp
Code:

sudo apt-get install uswsusp

Now you can try suspend and hibernate by giving the following commands
Code:

sudo s2disk
sudo s2ram --force

These will hopefully work. If they do not, you need to back up the following two files
Code:

sudo cp /usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-hibernate-linux /usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-hibernate-linux.bak
sudo cp /usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-suspend-linux /usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-suspend-linux.bak

Now replace the code in the following file
Code:

sudo gedit /usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-hibernate-linux

with:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/s2disk

And the code in

sudo gedit /usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-suspend-linux

with:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/s2ram --force

To fix the restart problem:

sudo apt-get install kexec-tools

Now

sudo gedit /etc/default/kexec

and make sure that load kexec is set to true.


Now restart your PC and enjoy :)

After following the above steps you will find that you can hibernate the PC when you click the hibernate button, but it will not hibernate once the battery runs low. For this you need to do a little bit of tweaking to make things right, first launch the global configuration editor

gconf-editor

Now navigate to apps/gnome-power-manager/general and uncheck use_time_for_policy.




Now you may wish to manually adjust the critical battery levels. For me the defaults were a bit too low :) To do so navigate to apps/gnome-power-manager/thresholds and adjust the percentages to your liking. I have set the percentage_action to 7, percentage_critical 10 and percentage_low at 20. Now when you have tweaked to your hearts content, click on close. Enjoy :) Happy hibernating!

Dell 1545 wireless and Ubuntu

As it turns out wireless network does not work on Dell 1545 in Ubuntu. Here is a simple solution

Ubuntu:
------
Go to System->Administration->Hardware Drivers
Choose the Broadcom STA wireless driver
Activate

Sometimes the driver does not show up in the Hardware Drivers choices. In
this case, try reinstalling the driver from the GUI or shell like this:

From the GUI:
Package Manager (System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager). Click the
Reload button in the upper left corner of Synaptic to refresh your index then
search for and reinstall the package named bcmwl-kernel-source.

Code:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get --reinstall install bcmwl-kernel-source 

in case the package was not already installed try
Code:

sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source

In either GUI or text case, after reinstalling, reboot your machine.

Or you may wish to download and manually install the driver from this link http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php


Ndiswrapper method

If you don not have luck with the above method or you have a different device then you can try the Ndiswrapper technique. A detailed walk-through is given here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/Ndiswrapper. For the curious, basically Ndiswrapper allows you to install and use windows drivers on Ubuntu. Good ain't it :D