T400 Suspend + Flat Battery = Crash

meverz

I recently deleted windows and installed Solus (as the only OS) on my (ancient) Thinkpad T400. The machine is only used once a week, to record using Audacity. Which works fine.

The issue comes when the Battery runs flat during suspend.

After finishing the recording, editing and burning it to CD. I close the laptop lid, and put it away. This is where the issue comes, when I open it up again the following week, it boots to grub fine, but then stays on the flashing cursor for a couple of minutes, and then it enters Emergency mode with the :/# command prompt and a flashing cursor.

From here, I'm not sure what to do.

For hardware it is a bog standard Thinkpad T400 with 4Gb of ram (I think). The only change I have made to the machine is to install a new, larger HDD. As the T400 doesn't have UEFI boot, it is using legacy (grub) boot.

CorvusRuber

meverz The issue comes when the Battery runs flat during suspend.

Of course the issue comes.
Given your use schedule, it should be better to hybernate or power off the laptop instead of suspending it (or at least keep it powered up all the time).

meverz

CorvusRuber Thankyou, I didn't realise there was a difference between hibernate and suspend. I just assumed (wrongly it turns out), that it would switch from suspend to hibernate when they battery ran down. Obviously that is incorrect, and I'll just have to get into the habit of shutting down once I am done.

Thanks again.

meverz

Thinking about this some more, I still would like to know what is going on with Solus. Becasue other distros don't display this same behaviour. My recollection was when I installed Fedora, it didn't work like this. So to check this week I installed Debian.

And with Debian, everything works as you would expect. I closed the lid, unplugged the power, and let the battery run flat. Then on powering everything up again, it goes to grub, then the desktop log in screen, as you would expect. Ideally Solus would exhibit this same behaviour, but I have no idea where to start with trouble shooting.

pomon

On what kernel this is happening. Show uname -a. Have you tried on another kernel e.g. lts?

meverz

pomon Sorry, I posted then left for Holidays, so haven't had a chance to come back to this yet. But now I have some time, and would really love to debug this if I can.

It is happening on the current kernel. Grub tells me it is 5.6.19-158.current. I haven't tried it on the lts. I'll do that now.

To check my sanity, I tested it again before I left - wiped the Hard Disk, then reinstalled Solus from scratch, rebooted, closed the lid on my laptop, unplugged it, and left it while we were away, I come back (the battery is well and truly dead), so I plug it in and try to boot it up, and still have the same issue.

I've tried multiple other distros (openSUSE, Debian and Arch), and none of them experience this behaviour, so Solus must be doing something different to the rest.

kp2401075

I have the same issue as well.

I have T470s (work laptop) runs Solus budgie 4.1.

The way I get around this is:
plugin the charger every time i suspect that battery would be near flat.

Haven't had any issues from past 3.5 months.

if you anyone finds better solution please post here.