a suspend question

[Richard]

I have two desktop machines running Ubuntu 16.04. My machine wakes up from suspend if I press any key, whereas my wife's machine does not. She has to press the power button.

I wonder wherein lies the difference.

Richard

[Eurus]

One of my machines, an old Toshiba laptop, runs 16.04.  It also requires a press of the power button to wake from suspend.  Sleep states are handled by the kernel under system-wide power management.  You can check out state files under /sys/power/.   

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/a...egies.html

If you need a deeper dive than that, I'm sure one of the Jedis here will be happy to elaborate further.

[Richard]

Thank you for your reply, Eurus. I was able to decipher the tech-speak in that document well enough to gather that the way a processor handles a suspend can determine the characteristics of the suspend.

My wife's machine has a Celeron processor, and mine has an Intel® Core™ i5-6400 CPU @ 2.70GHz × 4. That may have something to do with it.

As an aside: I read papers by Einstein and other physicists that are clearly stated and as easily understood as is possible to understand the subject at hand, whereas most documents written by computer experts are so heavy with jargon and tech-speak that the only people who can understand most of what the writer is saying are other tech people who already know. I sometimes wonder if it's that they are simply out-of-touch with their audiences, or if it's that their intended audiences are really other tech people, and what they are looking for is "attaboys" from other techies.

Thanks again.

Richard

[Eurus]

Good.  Then I bet now you can explain it better to me!

Sorry, I was hoping either you had a better context for the information in that link than I or one of the Jedis would quickly be willing to get in the weeds about how the power management subsystem specifically interacts at the hardware level. 

My initial thought was how a machine binds a key to wake may be related to specific driver support for ACPI functionality.  But I'm not sure that's right, and it still doesn't specifically answer your question as to how.

At the risk of insulting your intelligence by posting another potentially unhelpful link you could have easily web-searched and dismissed yourself, perhaps with your previous knowledge of Arch, the Arch wiki might be more clear and informative on power management states.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pow..._hibernate

I hope our resident Jedis chime in soon.

[cliffcoggin]

As an aside: I read papers by Einstein and other physicists that are clearly stated and as easily understood as is possible to understand the subject at hand, whereas most documents written by computer experts are so heavy with jargon and tech-speak that the only people who can understand most of what the writer is saying are other tech people who already know. I sometimes wonder if it's that they are simply out-of-touch with their audiences, or if it's that their intended audiences are really other tech people, and what they are looking for is "attaboys" from other techies.

Thanks again.

Richard

Agreed. My biggest complaint about computer related information is that the writers have resolutely refused to use English in the same way as the rest of the English speaking world. (Do other languages suffer the same problem I wonder?) I don't know if they invent terminology because they are illiterate, or because they feel that incomprehensible jargon gives them an elevated status. Whatever the reason, their failure to communicate their expertise in normal language is a source of irritation to me and many others.

[Tuxinho]

<<(Do other languages suffer the same problem I wonder?) >>

well, in french tech "literacy" they take it the the next level: they use English jargon in the middle of french sentences yes i rather laugh about it


Now i said that, let me agree with both of you. You know when you learn about something, you will need to acquire some concepts. If you study biologie you'll need to learn the organs definition, the cell definition and what not. If you study Economy you'll need to learn the definition of currency, inflation and many more.
With lot of different sciences you find all the definitions you need quite easily. Many of them we learned them at school, like what an organ is for instance.
With computer it is not as easy and none of use will ever search for a crash course in computer science. The huge majority of us never had a "computer class" at school to teach us what these concepts are. So we missing a lot of concepts indeed. And that make ours lives hard when we want to follow some computer conference or something.

[cliffcoggin]

Then I feel sorry for the French. It's bad enough that the English language is perverted by "computer speak", but it's a double perversion for the beautiful French language to be corrupted the same way.

As somebody with expertise in two technical subjects (chemistry and horology) I appreciate that certain terms and definitions are unique to the subject, and I am used to simplifying such terms and concepts for the layman even if it means being a little inaccurate. What I object to in computers are terms invented when perfectly good comprehensible terms already exist in English. An example that springs to mind is "drive". That device is not a drive, it does not conduct or lead anything, it does not power anything. It is a form of memory so why not use the word memory, a entirely self-explanatory term.

Anyway, none of this is relevant to the subject Richard raised so I'll stop here to avoid detracting from his question.