[plug] ACPI events and low battery

[Brad Campbell]

W.Kenworthy wrote:
> The gentoo acpi scripts call laptop_mode, where I have set it to call
> the suspend2 hibernate at 2% (!). It automagicly should do everything
> for you ... 

Oh, laptop mode.. hrm.. the laptop_mode installed by ubuntu has no option for actually doing 
something on a low battery except disabling itself.. I'll keep looking..

> Have not tested it as the battery lasts so long that I am never that far
> from charging it ...

I have got to the point now that I never even go out with the PSU in the bag. I carry the standard 
battery and the extended battery with me. The standard one gives me a good 5 hours on Wifi with a 
normal full workload and the extended gives me about 9.5. As I said, on a plane with wireless and 
bluetooth off I get 6-7.5 and 11-12 respectively. So I just don't need to be near power during the 
day now.

> Gotta luv the little vaio !!!
> 

I don't think I've ever been happier with a technology purchase as I am with this machine..

I'd *love* to get suspend-2-ram working though. If I boot off a kernel and an initrd such that I 
don't have the ata drivers loaded it works perfectly. I can get it to sleep and back in about 4 
seconds. The problem is all kernels I've tried thus far can't resume the hard disk.

I've applied the ATA ACPI patches to vanilla kernels and had slightly more luck, but it still takes 
30 seconds to come back and I have to reset the drive quite harshly with hdparm. On -mm kernels with 
the libata variants of the ATA drivers (Alan Cox latest work) I can get a reliable resume, but it 
still takes 30 seconds for the 1st drive command to time out before it resets the drive.

Got the screen suspending/resuming with vbetool though, which is supposed to be the least reliable 
part of s2ram.

I even installed MacOSX on it the other day (In a spare partition for testing purposes), but have 
the same problem every other intel display laptop user has.. it requires an external monitor to be 
connected to actually be usable.

I've still not really played with the internal SD reader, given the clashes it appears to have with 
ALSA, but I guess we'll get there one day. The front panel volume buttons still don't work (although 
I have a lead on that, just need some time to get my head in the kernel a bit). Other than that, 
with my hacked up sonypid and some helper scripts.. almost everything works just perfectly.

The inbuilt sound card blows goats though, but that is just a quirk of the intel HD chipset I guess. 
Gotta live with what you've got. (It works on for normal playback of most stuff, but flash and skype 
have grave difficulty with it).

Speaking of skype.. in case somebody missed it, they have a beta out with a native alsa driver. Does 
not really help me but it might be of use to someone.

Brad
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