Hibernation

Libretto's

On Libretto machines hibernation support is done purely by the BIOS. As a result it works fine under Linux. The only thing to bear in mind is that you must leave sufficient unpartitioned space for the BIOS to save all the state of the machine during hibernation. The size of this space is roughly equal to the maxium memory the model can have, plus the size of the video memory plus an extra megabyte.

If the hard disk in your Libretto is less that 8.4GB then the free space is at the end of the disk. I strongly recommend that you set the partitions up using MS-DOS fdisk. The BIOS lies to the fdisk program and shrinks the size of the disk reported. That way you are guaranteed to have sufficient free space for hibernation to work. When installing Linux you can then simply change the partition types when installing.

If you have upgraded the hard disk in your Libretto and have one larger than 8.4GB the situation is a bit more complicated. In this case you need to leave the free space immediately after the 8.4GB as a hole. I recommend making a partition for this space that extends a couple of megabytes below the 8.4GB space and is a bit bigger than needed the other way. I suggest using a partition type of 12 (Compaq diagnostic)

Satellite 15xx, 16xx and 17xx

These models appear to be rebadged clones from that part of China that is not part of China. At the very least these machines do not use a Toshiba BIOS, and instead use a Phoenix BIOS. While they are not supported by the Toshiba Linux Utilities for this reason, it may be that the Suspend-To-Disk feature of the Phoenix NoteBIOS works on these machines. In which case there is a Linux utility called lphdisk that can format the Phoenix hibernation partition, in addition to the PHDISK.EXE utility runs under MS-DOS that Phoenix provides.

Note that you do not need either utility to be able to take advantage of the Suspend-To-Disk feature. Once the hibernation partition is prepared, using either the DOS utility PHDISK.EXE that Phoenix provides, or lphdisk, it can be used to suspend a machine's memory to disk.

Other post 1998 models

Most post 1998 laptop models from Toshiba support Hibernation using a special file on a FAT16/32 partition and using some special HCI/SCI calls and PnP BIOS features. I have some preliminary support for supporting this method of hibernation under Linux. However I am currently awaiting delivery of some laptops that support this method of hibernation from Toshiba in Germany before I can finalize it and release a testing version. Please do not bug me for a copy as I will not send you a copy. Currently it has some problems that can result in stuffed filesystems and until these are fixed I will not be releasing the software.