boot times and software suspend (Was: Re: [plug] Distro Day !!!)

[Craig Ringer]

> And then there's software suspend... the equivalent of hibernation
> for linux. It's nearly approaching a 1.0 (aka stable!) release! The
> latest version (1.0pre17) has been rock solid on my machine (left it
> going overnight in a loop).

I had it going on my laptop and it was working really well, but then I 
made the mistake of updating it in the hope they'd fixed the XFree86 xv 
reinit problem. Whoops. The new one totally failed to work, and I 
haven't gone back to it since (my laptop battery controller died, so I 
don't have much use for swsusp 'till I get it fixed).

> Suspend in 25 seconds, resume in about 20 (from kernel booting -
> BIOS takes about 30 seconds to chug through :( ).

That's one of the advantages of the Intel desktop boards - stupidly fast 
POST, usually faster than the monitor can come out of standby. Unless 
you have a SCSI atapter :-( . My AMD based machine with an Adaptec SCSI 
card takes /forever/ to get through POST.