Comment 5 for bug 361853

I was able to fix this problem by removing all quirk definitions for this laptop in the /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/20-video-quirk-pm-dell.fdi .

By default the -quirk-s3-bios and -quirk-s3-mode were enabled. With both the laptop would freeze at a blank screen with a flashing cursor with the back light on. With either quirk option alone, the laptop would resume, accept commands, and be accessible over the network, but the back light would not come on. Adding the -quirk-dpms-on option did nothing. The only way to try no quirk options seems to be to edit the .fdi file and disable the quirks that match my laptop. With no quirk options, my laptop suspends with no problems, and the Ubuntu check box sleep test script ran with no problems.

You might visit the Free Desktop hal quirks page at http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/quirk/quirk-suspend-index.html and try the various combinations of quirk options, as well as no quirks, and see if any of these fixes the problems.

Note that that site claims that running the pm-suspend command by hand without any options does not use the hal fdi quirks, but in my testing this was not the case. The pm-suspend.log file, which lists the quirk command line parameters showed the matching quirk options from the fdi file when the command was run with no parameters.