Older laptop going into sleep mode when booting and shutting down

I have an old laptop that I want to give to a individual that is dealing with some financial difficulty. The laptop is an old Toshiba Satellite A110 (Celeron M with 1GB ram, 50GB HD) that I picked up for $15 at a garage sale. Since it did not have an OS, thought I would give Ubuntu Mate 16.10 32bit a try. So far, it runs pretty good on this old laptop other than one issue. When the laptop boots, just after the loading screen, it enters into a sleep mode. Hitting a key on the keyboard wakes it up again and then gets me to the login page. Then once I get to the login page, it goes into sleep mode again, and will do so in about 30 seconds if I don’t log in. Once logged in, the laptop does not go into sleep mode.

If I try to reboot or shutdown the laptop, it just enters into a sleep mode again. Only method to shut down the laptop is to open a terminal and perform a sudo shutdown in terminal.

I have tried updating GRUB with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash acpi=off” - did not fix.

Any suggestions?

HI @torbuck,

do you know what GPU it has because it isn’t listed here?:

http://www.toshiba.eu/discontinued-products/satellite-a110-110/

See the following links which may help as I had problems myself on an old Laptop:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions

Or maybe one of the following:

http://www.bodhilinux.com/

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/GetLubuntu

Hi torbuck

And you did update grub after the change?

A few other kernel options you can try:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions#Common_Kernel_Options

One gig of ram and a Celeron IMO is just not enough, I would also give Lubuntu a try.

Good luck, let us know what happens.

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I did update grub after my changes. Thank you for the link. I will give some of those options a try. I also read something about later versions of Ubuntu having sleep issues due to the graphics card for some reason. This Toshiba has a ATI Radeon 200M. Can’t see how an unsupported graphics adapter cause the laptop to enter into a sleep state when it shouldn’t, but I guess anything is possible.

I also read that someone had luck on the same laptop with Mint Mate, so will give that and Lubuntu a go if I can’t Ubuntu Mate to work on this laptop.

Appreciate your feedback!

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HI @torbuck,

the GPU problem stemmed from my old SIS grahics card which basically has Little Support in the Debian based OS world!.

Check out the boot options and see if there is something you can use and also make sure that your system is fully up-to-date!. :smiley:

I ended up replacing Ubuntu Mate with Mint Mate and happy to say, all the sleep issues have disappeared using Mint. It is definitely no speed demon, but adequate enough for someone who is mainly going to use the laptop for some casual web surfing, e-mail and word processing.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

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