My Arch is toast

Basu · 2007-12-16 01:14:07

Fellow Archers, I have a sad, sad tale to tell. A few days my Arch laptop stopped waking up from sleep. I looked around the forums and thought that it might be a problem with the catalyst driver, but on downgrading to the old fglrx drivers I found that I couldn't use Arch at all. It would boot up fine, but wouldn't get to the GDM login and nothing I did would make it respond. I'm going to try to rescue it one more time using an Ubuntu live CD, but I'm not very hopeful. Unfortunately my laptop is my main production machine, I can't afford to have it out-of commission. I've put a fair amount of time into getting it up and running, but there are problems (mainly due to the hardware). My Atheros wireless needs ndiswrapper and a Windows driver, performance can be quite erratic and the ATI Radeon card can be problematic. Added to that is the phoenix bios, which makes powersaving difficult. I need to run a Linux distro because it is my main development platform. But considering the current instabilities in XOrg and the fglrx drivers, I think that I will have to move to something less bleeding edge, I'm thinking Ubuntu. If things stabilize in six months time, I will move back. But till then, it will have to be good bye.
Thanks for the good times.
Basu

iphitus · 2007-12-16 01:30:53

To recover it, you shouldnt need a liveCD, just add "1" to your bootloader line at the bootloader stage. This will put you in single-user mode, where you can rescue your system.

Maybe the open source radeon driver will be more stable, you could try that.

Basu · 2007-12-16 18:27:14

Ok I managed to fix things. Looks like my suspend problem isn't with fglrx at all. I think I'll roll back acpid and pm-utils (i think they wer updated recently as well) and see if it works.

neotuli · 2007-12-21 18:37:31

Sounds like the same (insert unknown issue here) I have. The best I could narrow it down to was that it was a regression in the kernel, anything after the .22 series won't wake from sleep (including .24rc's).

Try rolling your kernel back to .22 and not upgrading it for a while, that's what I ended up doing... although I plan on pressing the issue a bit more and fixing it if I can. Only problem is that isolating a particular patch/code causing it in the kernel is..well.. it's a bitch. :-/

oo oo also. try putting some butter and marmalade on your arch, it makes toast taste better

.:B:. · 2007-12-21 18:59:22

Does it happen like this: Suspend to RAM, try to resume, it pretends to resume, then completely shuts down?

I've had it too, with 2.6.23+ (so also latest 2.6.24 RC ); that only happens when i have the lid close event associated with suspend to RAM. If i disassociate it all is well (I do a suspend from my logout menu).

My GRUB kernel arguments are: highres=off nohz=off.

sm4tik · 2007-12-21 22:29:51

I've kind had the principle of "if it's not broken, then why fix it" with kernel so I've added
IgnorePkg = kernel26
to my pacman.conf straight from the beginning. This works fine for me because my computers are at least a few years old (and even the live distros with 2.4x kernel haven't even once let me down). And if ever there is a package or whatever which _needs_ the latest kernel as a dependency, I'll upgrade. But never the kernel just because it's "bleeding edge".

Basu · 2007-12-22 01:58:15

Thanks for all your help guys. Look slike downgrading the kernel is the only option I have, but that would mean pushing back catalyst and ndiswrapper as well. Since I dont really need suspend right now, I'm not going to do it right now, but if I find myself needing it, I will. Thanks again

Arch Linux

#1 2007-12-16 01:14:07

My Arch is toast

#2 2007-12-16 01:30:53

Re: My Arch is toast

#3 2007-12-16 18:27:14

Re: My Arch is toast

#4 2007-12-21 18:37:31

Re: My Arch is toast

#5 2007-12-21 18:59:22

Re: My Arch is toast

#6 2007-12-21 22:29:51

Re: My Arch is toast

#7 2007-12-22 01:58:15

Re: My Arch is toast

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