Turning Off the Computer

[Robert Krawitz]

   Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:45:41 -0400 (EDT)
   From: "Rich Braun" <richb-RBmg6HWzfGThzJAekONQAQ at public.gmane.org>

   Prius-driving Cantabridgian that I am, I still leave my computers
   on 24/7.  I simply *cannot* stand waiting for the bootup sequence.
   For decades, no vendor has dealt with this issue.  (Fastest boot
   time of any computer I've used?  A VAX 750, circa 1983: about 20
   seconds.)

I also leave mine on.  I download updates and run backups overnight
via cron; it's also our home mail server.

   Apple's leading this effort thus far, with proper support of S3
   suspend-to-RAM.  I can close up my MacBook, forget to turn off the
   power button, toss it in the trunk of my car and forget about it
   for a few days and then discover that my sessions are all still
   intact.

   S2RAM burns less than a watt of energy in standby.  It's the wave
   of the Linux future.  But alas it's still futuristic, I haven't
   been able to get it to work in any real-world Linux situation.

Huh.  For several months I'd been using only suspend to disk on my
Inspiron E1705, figuring that S2RAM would be nothing but grief (it
never worked right on my I8200).  S2D usually works fine; on occasion
it hangs during the resume.  The other week, on a lark, I tried
S2RAM...and it just plain worked, and I haven't had any problems at
all with it since (maybe 20 cycles thus far).

I could configure the power management to S2RAM when I close the lid,
but I don't want to (sometimes I use an external monitor, and
sometimes I leave things running in the background).  This is all
OpenSUSE 11.0.