The Fugue

There's a problem with sleep on the iBook G4 with Radeon 9200 under linux. It will go to sleep just fine, but will not wake up properly.

The problem is related to DRI. If you disable DRI in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 (or xorg.conf), it works great. It also works great if you don't use X at all, although if you use X once and then exit the problem still exhibits itself.

The great news here is that you don't need to disable DRI, because there's an option that will fix things. The magic option is AGPMode, which you want to set to 4. Here's my Device section:

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Radeon Mobility 9200 M9+"
    Driver     "radeon"
    Option     "UseFBDev" "on"
    Option     "AGPMode"  "4"
EndSection

Voilá! Perfect sleep. Supposedly, the kernel is supposed to take care of that AGP mode stuff but it isn't doing so properly, so in future kernel versions (I am using 2.6.11.10) it may work without this option.

Working sleep, along with working wireless (I will blog the USB wireless adapter soon), has made linux a viable alternative to OS X for me. We shall really see which one I will gravitate towards, now that the showstopping barriers are gone.