2 year Ubuntu user here... trying to find a distro that my laptop likes...

[SinxarKnights]

S3 is the suspend that puts your session into memory and powers down. Much faster than S4 (normal Hibernate) but you can lose data if you lose power to the machine. My MB does not support S4, only S1 and S3.

I like to just walk away from my computer and come back later. I don't want it running constantly or even be bothered with shutting it down and waiting for it to start back up again (LoL, pretty lazy eh?).

I found out that my issue is a bug with the restricted ATI driver and Ubuntu 7.1.

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Here ya go: Shamelessly copied from Omar Shahine's WebLog : Standby Explained (S1, S3)

S0 - Working State

In this state, your PC is awake and working

S1- CPU Stopped

In this state, your PC is technically in standby and this is the default standby state if S3 is not supported. Power consumption is Five Watts to Thirty Watts of Power.

S3 - Suspend to RAM (context saved to RAM)

In this state, your PC in standby and all fans, hard drivers and other devices are powered down into a sleep state. Power consumption is less than Five Watts.

S4 - Suspend to Disk(Context saved to HDD)

Otherwise known as Hibernate, your PC has saved the contents of RAM to the hard disk and is pretty much tuned off. Power consumption is less than Five Watts. This isn't very useful for desktop PCees and is mostly used in Laptops where battery drainage is far better than if you are in S3.

 

[Kharn]

Has anyone noticed that the older distros like debian , Redhat an Mandriva (used to be mandrake) have better support for older computers an not so common hardware? distributions based on them don't seem to have that same level of support.

 

[SinxarKnights]

So im guessing Debian worked?

 

[Jayce]

So far, no. But I haven't tinkered with it much. Honestly I've just lost interest in Linux on my laptop, especially after booting to Debian and it doesn't even recognize my wireless... Maybe when I have some more free time in the near future I'll tinker with it more.

 

[Kharn]

Tried OpenSuSe yet? That is the only one that works with my laptops built in wireless.

 

[SinxarKnights]

So far, no. But I haven't tinkered with it much. Honestly I've just lost interest in Linux on my laptop, especially after booting to Debian and it doesn't even recognize my wireless... Maybe when I have some more free time in the near future I'll tinker with it more.

Well that sux.

 

[Jayce]

Tried OpenSuSe yet? That is the only one that works with my laptops built in wireless.

Yep. 10.3.

 

[nakoruru]

I don't know about Ubunto, but here is how you get the Realtek 8187b wireless card to work under Mandriva 2008.0...

* Go to Mandriva Control Center
* If Mandriva recognized that the wireless card exists, but it is not working, go and configure that adaptor. Otherwise, if it does not see the card, configure a new wireless adaptor
* Choose ndiswrapper
* Select the Windows .inf driver file for the Realtek 8187b wireless card.

** Note: Do NOT use the Windows Vista version of the driver. This has not worked for me. Use the Windows 98 or 2000 version of the driver. I got both to work, but I recommend Win98 version, as I had better stability with this. I found the 2000 version would occasionally lose networking after having transmitted enough data.

** Note: Wireless encryption will not work (such as WEP or WPA). At least, it did not work me. If you try to use encryption, Mandriva will see the various wireless access points, but will not successfuly connect to these networks. Using an unprotected access point works fine though. In such a case, use MAC address filtering on the access point as some small measure of security.

This worked on both my Gateway T-1616 and T-1625 laptops. Both use the Realtek 8187b.

Good luck!

 

[horndude]

this is not a distro problem, changing distro's isn't going to solve anything, stop it with the windows thinking

linux distros use ALSA for sound, sure the version of ALSA may change a bit from one distro to the next but its still ALSA, and updated versions of ALSA can be added to an existing distro(had to do this once with slackware)

as far as your wireless goes, well it isn't natively supported by any of the 2.6 series kernels so you have to resort to some hacking and kludge work and even then it still might not work, and once again this isn't a distro problem either

your choices are:
use ndiswrapper if possible and maybe get it to work more or less

search for a cutting edge kernel or find someone that has written a kernel module to support that chipset(good luck)

changelogs for kernels and distro's along with software lists are published for most of the half way decent distro's, it pays to check these sometimes