Let me just say right off that this is just a hobby project and not a production machine, so it's not really critical that I get this going. I am however using this exercise to learn a little about XFCE and see if could servce me as my desktop environement going forward, seeing as how I just don't like Gnome3.

So, I have Aptosid with XFCE running on my A31p, and for the most part am enjoying the experience. I currently have one issue that I would like a little help to resolve as I don't know where to even start trouble shooting. I have XFCE power mangement set to suspend when the laptop lid is closed, and that is exactly what happens. In addition, when Fn+F4 is pressed, suspend is the result. But, I can't get it to wake from syspend no matter what I do! Actually, it does seem to wake, as there is a beep to indicate waking, but the LCD backlight won't come on, and I don't get any response from any keyboard combination. The backlight just won't come back on.

Second thing is not really an issue, just something I would like to accomplish. I have compositioning enabled and have set the XFCE panels to be nearly transparent (looks nice), and I have window shadows enabled (looks nice and modern), but I would like to have the text boxes below desktop icons to be transparent too. I have found a couple of guides online that seemed to indicate ways to do this. But, when I created and edited the gtkrc-2.0 file the suggest, nothing changes. So, what can I do to accomplish this goal?

Unfortunately i don't know the answer to your question, sorry, and i don't intend to hijack your thread - but i've just installed Crunchbang on my A31p, having always run XP on it. Have you managed to get the volume keys to work? I figured as theyre both Debian based, you may be better placed to help...

I abandoned the A31p project a while back without ever having resolved the suspend problem. I also have CrunchBang running on an X31 now, and have the same suspend problem, as the GPU is similar (not the same I know) on the two machines, and AFAIK, the same driver is used under Linux for both. From what I've read the Radeonfb in the Linux kernel should handle suspend OK, but it doesn't, and I don't know enough to fix it.

As for the volume buttons...I don't recall if I had them working or not. Probably not. There is some info about that here, but I don't remember ever trying to set any of that up. Now that you mention it, I don't think the volume buttons are working on my X31 either. Guess I've got a little project ahead of me testing those instructions myself!

Neil,

A quick google of radeonfb + suspend/resume issues, and there are countless threads, bug requests, proposed patches etc - i wouldn't even know where to start. I wonder whether you've looked into S2Ram yet - some documentation can be found here and here

Aside from that, i'm sorry to say i can offer very little help - i'm not as familiar with linux as i'd like to be, hence my inability to figure out how to get volume keys to work Actually, they do work, kind of - just not in sync with the volume control applet...

Actually, I have not tried s2ram, but I will when I get the time. I see it includes radeontool, we'll see if that does it.

I might be able to help with the volume button problem. I've had the volume controls working on a R31 and a A20 using the following:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Tpb

The trickiest bit for me is usually loading nvram and getting it to write, aside from that, it's reasonably straightforward. To run it after that I just add "tpb &" into my .xinitrc on Arch.

On top of getting the buttons working, you can then assign functions to the ThinkPad key (mine opens urxvt) or play around with the OSD.