acpitool as an Alternative Suspend Method for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)

I've noticed that people still seem to be having difficulties suspending their laptops after upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx). I had mentioned previously that there is a command-line tool called powersaved that allowed me to put my Toshiba Satellite A200 laptop in suspend mode when the main suspend function in Ubuntu 9.10 could not. The good news, after upgrading to Lucid Lynx, is that the main suspend function (accessed through the session management menu in Gnome-Panel) actually suspends my laptop! The bad news is that, for those of you who are still having suspend issues after upgrading to Lucid, powersaved is no longer available.

To help, I set my mind to searching Synaptic Package Manager for a command-line program that works like powersaved but is actually available to Lucid Lynx users. I have thus far found a very helpful little command-line program called acpitool. It's so simple to use! Once you install it, just type sudo acpitool -s and your computer will go into suspend! If you follow my directions on how to make a launcher script from my previous post regarding powersaved then you'll also have a button to make it even easier to use this command-line tool.

Hope this helps people!

Workaround for broken Ubuntu Suspend functionality in your Toshiba Satellite

Lately I've been noticing that my Toshiba Satellite A200 Laptop, on which I'm running Ubuntu 9.10, simply won't go into Suspend-mode properly. I did some googling and found out that there's an alternative program you can download to put your computer in suspend mode called Powersave. Its use is remarkably easy and I'm happy to report that it is managing to put my laptop in suspend when the regular suspend in Ubuntu can not manage.

Usage

Go into your terminal and type in: powersave -u. That's it!! It is also technically supposed to be able to put your computer in hibernate by typing in powersave -U, but it simply doesn't work on my computer for some reason.

Installation

If you are having similar problems as I am and want to install this program, either go to Synaptic Package Manager and look for and install powersaved, or go to your terminal and type in sudo apt-get install powersaved. You can make it even easier on yourself by creating a shell script containing the powersave command with the suspend argument. Simply navigate in Nautilus to the directory where you want to create your shell script, right click on the background of that directory's window, click on Create Document > Empty File, and then add the following into the empty document:

#! /bin/bash

powersave -u

When you're done, save it with a filename such as suspend.sh, and then create a launcher that activates your script. I right-clicked on my upper Gnome-Panel and clicked on Add To Panel... > Custom Application Launcher, entered in "Suspend" in the name field, sh /home/inkhorn/Scripts/suspend.sh in the command field, and chose a custom icon to represent the launcher on my panel.

Now all I have to do is click on my newly created launcher button on my Gnome-Panel and my computer goes into Suspend mode like it should! You of course don't need to go through the trouble to make a button for this on your Gnome-Panel like I have, but it certainly saves typing in the long run.