When I try to wake my laptop up from suspend it reads from the hard drive for a few seconds then stops and just sits. The screen is off and the computer doesn't respond to any inputs, I have to force a shut down by holding the power button down. When I push the caps lock key the light does not come on.

The computer would suspend fine with Linux Mint 4. I upgraded to Mint 5 and it would no longer suspend, and it more than tripled my boot times. I then decided to try Sabayon, which is not suspending, but does boot at a reasonable speed.

I haven't had to configure anything for suspend for a couple of years so I don't remember what to do, and I can't find anything relevant with searches.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

The computer is a Gateway MX3230.
Intel CeleronM 420
Via VN800 Chipset/Graphics with the openchrome driver.
Realtek 8185 Wireless NIC.

If you need any other info please let me know.

Thank you.

In general, devices not suspend/resume aware are the common causes of this behavior.
My desktop with the nvidia driver (proprietary driver from NVidia) has this behavior. If I access my machine by the network it is fully functional, except both the usb keyboard/mouse and the video are off.

If I use the nv video driver (opensource video driver for NVidia cards) the machine and keyboard suspend and resume as expected.

I was told some windows wifi drivers loaded by ndiswrapper can cause the same behavior. To test this, try to not use/load wifi drivers using ndiswrapper or, if using regular wifi drivers, unload it with "rmmod driver_name" before you put your laptop in suspend mode. If it resumes then you found the cause.

Thanks for the reply, but unfortunately (at least for this situation) I have no proprietary drivers loaded. So no quick and easy checks with proprietary drivers.

Unfortunally, suspend/hibernate was a problem for years in linux. There is no a simple answer, and may be, for some hardware there is no solution at all.
My advice is to google your specific hardware and try other versions of suspend/hibernate infra-structure. You may need to recompile your kernel to adopt a alternative software suspend/hibernate solution....sorry.

Thanks for the help.