LaptopTestingTeam FAQ

Please put quick Gotchas/FAQs that would be useful to other Laptop Testers here.

Hibernate

Hibernate (System->Logout->Hibernate, aka 'Suspend to Disk') will only work if have a valid and working swap partition. There kernel will complain with an error message such as:

Aug 30 23:02:35 localhost kernel: [4325496.559000] Stopping tasks: ==============|
Aug 30 23:02:36 localhost kernel: [4325496.572000] Freeing memory...  ^H-^H\^H|^H/^Hdone (68051 pages freed)
Aug 30 23:02:36 localhost kernel: [4325497.815000] swsusp: FATAL: cannot find swap device, try swapon -a!
Aug 30 23:02:36 localhost kernel: [4325497.815000] swsusp: Restoring Highmem

You can see if you have one by doing:

$ cat /proc/swaps
Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/sda5                               partition       979924  211768  -1

Suspend/Sleep

If sleep button does not work, try testing Sleep from the System->Log Out->Suspend menu. If that does not work either, or the option to Suspend does even not show up, check if Sleep is enabled in /etc/default/acpi-support (uncomment the "ACPI_SLEEP=true" line to enable), and try again. ~~["Nanotube"]

X failing to start

If X is totally busted and gives you the (blue) dialogue screen stating that X is failing start, but you are unable to send any keypresses. The following may get you out of the situation enough to debug it.

• Pressing Ctrl-d (end-of-file) may send the keystrokes that you have typed but which have been buffered and haven't appeared.

• Pressing Alt-SysRq-e should kill most programs and allow you to switch to another virtual terminal using Alt-F2, where you should (hopefully) find a login-prompt.

ACPI DSDT replacement

If you have a buggy DSDT on your machine and the ACPI isn't working, it's possible to extract and fix it. A new one can be loaded at boot-time to override the one in the BIOS by placing it in:

sudo cp my-fixed-dsdt.aml /etc/mkinitramfs/DSDT.aml
sudo mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-`uname -r` `uname -r`

Testing 3D

$ which glxgears | xargs strings | grep benchmark | xargs glxgears
4913 frames in 5.0 seconds = 982.508 FPS

LunaTick: From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTesting - the best way to test this is to start a terminal and type the following:

glxinfo | grep rendering

This will print either "direct rendering: Yes" or "direct rendering: No"