Thinkpads Forum

Running Hardy Heron

Last week, I was running Ubuntu on my battery. It got low. Rather than shutting down, it just turned off. Shutting down means that it goes through the shut down script and everything closes as it should. Turning off means that it just pulled the plug on the power.

I have my power manager set to "shut down" rather than hibernate or suspend.

Any thoughts on this one?

Either "hibernate" or "suspend" requires power to get to and stay in that state. If the battery went too low to support either, it will turn off. Shutdown requires a specific sequence of events to happen which means the drive, CPU, and RAM are in need of power. I believe the hardware had no option but to turn off - in that situation.

Hibernate does not require power to stay in that state.

I'm not an Ubuntu wizard, but it seems to me that the system either doesn't know how much power is left, has a wrong idea of how much is left, or doesn't act on the knowledge that the power is critically low so it can start the proper shutdown sequence.

Unfortunately, it can be really hard to get diagnostic information when the machine just turns off, but you need to find out which of those is happening. The Ubuntu forums and IRC channels are full of folks who can help. ThinkWiki.org might be another place to look, along with the Linux ThinkPad Mailing List at http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/mailm ... x-thinkpad.

O.K., you're right. It doesn't take power to STAY in hibernate, but it does take power to CHANGE a system's state, regardless. If the hardware doesn't see enough power, it's going to shut off without further consultation with the OS. Now if the OS isn't tracking power correctly, that's a different situation. It may be that the OS developers need to look at that.