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

Suspend to RAM on my Dell Latitude D800 just works with Fedora Core 5 and the free nv driver. Suspend also works with the binary-only nvidia driver, but the display either stays black or shows some fascinating color patterns after resume.

It turns out that fixing this is easy, and well worth it. The nvidia driver not only gives you 3D support, but also feels faster when switching tabs in Firefox.

The following has been tested with kernel-2.6.17-1.2174_FC5 and NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8774 on a Dell Latitude D800 with a GeForce FX Go5200.

As described in the nV News Forum, the following has to be done:

1. Append "agp=off" to the kernel line in /etc/grub.conf. This disables the built-in AGP driver and allows nvidia to load its own.

   kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.17-1.2174_FC5 ro root=/dev/vg1/root quiet agp=off

2. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and set the NvAGP option:

   Section "Device"
       ...
       Driver         "nvidia"
       Option         "NvAGP" "1"
   EndSection
   	

3. Edit /etc/pm/functions-nvidia and disable the "vbetool post" call:

   resume_video()
   {
   	...
   #       /usr/sbin/vbetool post
           ...
   }
   	

4. Reboot, log in and check if the nvidia AGP driver is used:

   # cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status
   Status:          Enabled
   Driver:          NVIDIA
   	

Suspend and resume should work now.