The problem

Whenever I do systemctl suspend, system sleeps normally. But after pressing the power button and power back on, PC totally freezes. No mouse movement, can’t change tty. Doing this without startx will result in same thing but tty can change except no response from keyboard at all.

Tried solutions

There are multiple posts in the forum discussing this problem with non leading to a actual solution. I used journalctl to figure out what errors could have resulted from previous boot. But there was non that was significant. The forum posts mentioned nouveau graphic drivers suck at power management, and I should install Nvidia proprietary drivers instead. But Nvidia drivers for my PC is so ancient its not updated in probably 10 years. Another mentioned how the WIFI driver would also affect the sleep process due to not powering off properly.

Conclusions

I am stuck for now. This is extremely annoying as I use sleep almost daily on my Windows installation. This also confirms my that Linux is not that great for older hardware probably due to problems like this that don’t exist on Windows.

Firstly make sure to upgrade Arch and packages.

sudo pacman -Syu

Alright, now install pulseaudio which is like a software front-end which sits on top of alsa which is your kernel level sound mixer that directly talks to sound card.

At the same time install alsa-utils for some useful tools.

pacman -S pulseaudio alsa-utils

alsa-utils contain alsa-mixer which is good enough if you are a CLI freak. alsa-mixer is like a CLI volume control/mixer to control the volume coming out of your sound devices. Or if you don’t like that, try to use pavucontrol.

pacman -S alsamixer pavucontrol

If you are lucky you should have a literal deafening sound when you try to play any application with sound. Try to go on Youtube and play video and see if you are deaf or not 💀.

Or if you are unlucky like me.. I got no sound because I plugged my earphone into an earphone jack that is in my monitor which is connected through HDMI. If you are using alsa-mixer press the hotkey to switch your sound cards to HDMI and see if the volume there is muted or not, in my case it was.

I am still experimenting with window managers (AwesomeWM) and trying to hotkey volume and get a widget that controls it. Once that’s done I’ll make another blog post on how to do it.

The original theme is kind of minimalist which is good if I want to add features but at the same time I want other features from other themes too. I’ve been referencing other themes to modify this theme.

Hugo is a pain in the butt. I’ve been trying to learn Go but it’s going to be taking a while…

In the mean time to test image uploading, here’s a cat.