Suspend and the blinking power led

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Louis Garcia wrote:

> On Mon, 2006-10-09 at 21:53 -0400, Louis Garcia wrote:
>>> I noticed that windows doesn't have the power led blinking when
>>> suspended as fedora does. Any reason for this? how much power does that
>>> consume? Is their a way to change the behavior? This is on a laptop by
>>> the way.
>>
>> The difference is probably the nature of the suspend. Suspend to disk
>> is when the system writes the memory to disk (swap area usually) and
>> then turns off completely. No power used and no lights flashing.
>> Suspend to memory is a different sort of hibernation where the system
>> is put to sleep but the memory is kept powered up to retain its
>> contents. This mode does require some power to keep the memory powered
>> and usually has some kind of flashing light. The benefit of this
>> approach is it is much faster to suspend/resume then the to-disk
>> approach.
>> So, how did you suspend the machine in each case ?
>>
>> Chris
>>
>>> -Louis
>
> So lets talk linux terminology. The gnome menu has suspend and shut
> down/hibernate, which does what? I thought suspend meant suspend to disk
> and hibernate was suspend to ram?

In Windows terminology, hibernate means suspend to disk.  In the GNOME 
menus (in FC5), I don't see an alternative to suspending.  The System 
pulldown offers Suspend and Shutdown options, and the Shutdown option 
offers Suspend, Restart, and Shut Down.  The gnome-power applet 
Preferences menu allows you to select Suspend or Hibernate when the lid is 
closed or battery is critical or the system is idle.  There doesn't seem 
to be a way to hibernate from the menus.

>
> -Louis
>
>
>

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs