Update 15 Jun 2007: See Dell Latitude D800 Suspend to RAM with Fedora 7 for an updated version of this article.

With a 1-day delay of my Air France flight to Paris, I had enough time to fix suspend to RAM on my new Dell Latitude D800 under Fedora Core 3.

The following assumes that your D800 contains an NVIDIA graphics card, a Broadcom ethernet adapter, and an Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 adapter.

As noted in Aram Kananov's How To, you first need to replace the nv driver with NVIDIA's nvidia driver. The setup is described in the README that is part of the driver package.

Next, you need a script to remove certain modules before entering suspend mode, and for reloading those modules afterwards. Place the following in /etc/acpi/actions/suspend2mem.sh - credits for the original version go to Tomislav Vujec:

#!/bin/sh

PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
export PATH

# The synergyc process would block the unloading
# of the ethernet module, so we kill it.
killall synergyc

# Unmount all network filesystems
service netfs stop

# Stop local networking
service network stop

# Disable network modules
rmmod tg3
rmmod ipw2200
rmmod ieee80211
rmmod ieee80211_crypt

# Disable USB modules
rmmod usb_storage
rmmod uhci_hcd
rmmod ehci_hcd

# Preventive sync
sync

# Suspend
echo mem > /sys/power/state

# Come back...

# Resync clock
hwclock --hctosys

# Reenable USB
modprobe uhci_hcd
modprobe ehci_hcd

# Reenable network modules
modprobe tg3
modprobe ipw2200

# Start local networking
service network start

# Mount all network filesystems
service netfs start

To make ACPI use this script when you press Fn+Esc, put this into /etc/acpi/events/sleep:

event=button/sleep.*
action=/etc/acpi/actions/suspend2mem.sh

Now, don't press Fn+Esc yet. As noted in Appendix S of the NVIDIA driver README, the 2.6 kernel AGP driver has problems when waking up from a suspend. So, save everything and try Fn+Esc, but don't be surprised if X won't come back.

To test if the AGP driver is the culprit, add the following line in the "Driver" section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Option      "NvAgp" "0"

Restart your X server, and try suspend+resume again. If it works now, you should compile a custom kernel to disable the kernel AGP driver.

If suspend doesn't work, look into /var/log/messages, and search for "Stopping tasks". This sometimes fails for some processes, which you then have to kill in the suspend2mem.sh script. Other processes, like Synergy2, can block the unloading of network modules, so they too have to be killed.

Install the kernel source RPM with up2date --get-source kernel, or download it from one of the Fedora mirrors. Go to /usr/src/redhat/SPECS, and generate the patched kernel source with rpmbuild -bp --target=i686 kernel-2.6.spec.

Afterwards, the source is in /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/kernel-2.6.10/linux-2.6.10. Configure it to compile the AGP drivers as modules - the easiest way to do this is to remove all lines starting with "CONFIG_AGP" from .config. Build and install the kernel with make modules bzImage modules_install install.

If you need special drivers or LVM to mount your root filesystem, don't forget to run mkinitrd. You also have to reinstall the NVIDIA driver for the new kernel.

In /etc/X11/xorg.conf, change the NvAgp option to "1", to activate NVIDIA's internal AGP support.

I found no clean way to disable the kernel AGP driver, so I just renamed /lib/modules/2.6.10-prep/kernel/drivers/char/agp/intel_agp.ko to intel_agp.ko.disabled.

When you now start X, and look at /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status, you should see that the NVIDIA AGP driver is used, and suspend+resume should work.

Yet another round of fun with USB under Fedora Core 3. This time, I brought home an Epson Stylus CX6600 printer/scanner/copier.

The printer part of it was easy to set up with the Printing system settings. There is no driver for the CX6600 yet, but the CX6400 driver works just fine.

Before I was able to use the scanner, I had to fix the usual permissioning problem, because only root has access to the scanner by default. Following the ideas in Karl Heinz Kremer's SANE Epson HowTo, I added the following line in /etc/hotplug/usb/libsane.usermap, which is part of the sane-backends RPM:

libusbscanner 0x0003 0x04b8 0x0813 \
  0x0000 0x0000 0x00 0x00 0x00 \
  0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00000000

This has to be entered as one line without the backslashes. The second and third hexadecimal numbers can be found by running lsusb, the 0x0003 at the start and the zeros at the end are identical for all device entries.

With this line, hotplug invokes the script /etc/hotplug/usb/libusbscanner whenever the Epson CX6600 is connected or disconnected, and gives the currently logged-in user access to the USB device.

This would already be enough for using the scanner with the excellent VueScan. If you want to use it with SANE, you'll have to add the following line in /etc/sane.d/epson.conf:

usb 0x04b8 0x0813

Before doing this, you can run sane-find-scanner to check if your version of SANE detects the scanner. Afterwards, scanimage -L should list an "Epson Unknown model flatbed scanner".

Because they are funded by the public and already offer their content as streaming audio on the Web, I have been wondering why Germany's non-commercial radio stations have not jumped onto the podcasting band waggon yet.

Well, two radio stations are already on their way: DeutschlandRadio and Deutschlandfunk, whose programs not only consist of the usual news, but also of diverse topics ranging from a study on birds killed by wind mills, to the Danish press coverage of the recent election in Germany's northern-most state.

Each of these 3-20 minute contributions is available as an MP3 file, with two different user interfaces:

• HTML, simple and easy to use, good for downloading the files and listing to them later, but no RSS feed.

• Flash, also nice, and best for immediate listening.

All this content is in German. The international broadcasting station Deutsche Welle has English Audio on Demand, but you need Real Player and judging from the list, it's only a collection of complete programs, without any information about the contents. Pretty disappointing compared to DeutschlandRadio, or the BBC, which offers RSS feeds and content summaries for two of their programs.

Update 2005-03-07: There's still no RSS feed, but Deutschlandradio Kultur had a nice piece about podcasting today. Unfortunately, the MP3 is no longer available as of 2005-09-15.