Failed Resume From Sleep

The complexity of computer software never stops astounding me.

Suddenly one day my Thinkpad T400 laptop suspend and resume function stopped working. The laptop would resume from sleep and then about two seconds later suspend again. Pressing the Fn button a second time restored the system, but the network connection remained unusable for about 30 seconds or so.

The Ethernet wake-on-lan option was always disabled upon resuming from sleep. While the desktop was restoring, the MATE power manager in the system tray temporarily disappeared.

Flaky.

For a couple of hours I tinkered and looked for various causes.

Eventually I remembered I had removed the mate-screensaver package.

Could that be the cause? No way, right?

I restored the package and resuming from sleep worked as expected.

Apparently something in the MATE desktop is designed to expect the mate-screensaver package to be installed. Removing the package broke resume from sleep.

Ripley’s. Classic WTF.

Posted: January 19, 2017 Category: Usability Tagged: General, MATE

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