Linux

Matthew Garrett

A lot of background on the state of laptop support in Linux. It worked reasonably well in the 90s, but with the migration to ACPI, has become much more complicated and less reliable in general, especially with suspend/resume and video.

Emporer Linux and System 76 produce Linux supported laptops.

I wanted some more in-depth technical information and found Matthew later on at the Intel booth. Here's what I learned:

s2ram is little more than a wrapper around standard ACPI sleep that has options to do video mode save/restore

I asked him about all the many, many different userland laptop management tools. He recommends simple acpi-utils with the ondemand governor. laptop-mode-tools tries to do way too much, and there is little point to using a userland governor anymore.

I've been having a problem with my MacBook Pro (Core Duo) hanging on suspend about 10% of the time. I explained the symptoms and asked him how to go about debugging it. He suggested disabling console suspend and enabling PM debug in the kernel. I will give that a try and see what I get.

Here's how you use a Sierra Wireless 595U USB modem to connect to wireless Internet service with Sprint:

Insert the modem into the USB slot. lsusb should show:

Bus 001 Device 005: ID 1199:0120 Sierra Wireless, Inc.

rmmod usbserial

Then:

modprobe usbserial vendor=0x1199 product=0x0120

You should see /dev/ttyUSB0, ttyUSB1, and ttyUSB2 appear. See also instructions for automating this with a similar card (modify vendor and product to above settings).

Now you will need to configure PPP for this. On Debian, run pppconfig. Your settings will be:

Phone number: #777
Username: 1234567890@sprintpcs.com (replace 1234567890 with your data card's "phone number", no dashes)
Password: your sprint password
Speed (BPS): 921600 (use lower numbers such as 115200 if you have trouble with this)
Port: /dev/ttyUSB0
Init string: ATZ

Here are some other helpful pages:

Verizon EVDO
Sprint and Linux
Cingular AT&T UMTS
Sierra's Linux page