As part of my switch from Mandriva to Ubuntu, I had the opportunity today to contribute some improvements back to both operating systems.

Having just used Mandriva on this laptop, I knew it was possible for the sound to keep working after a suspend/resume cycle, but it quit working after the Ubuntu switch.

Since Mandriva's solution was made available under an open source license, I was able to review it adapt to work with Ubuntu, and Ubuntu can easily and legally accept this solution, if they choose.

In the process of the code review, I found a bug in Mandriva's code, so that the new and nice Exaile music player wouldn't automatically launch after a resume.

I submitted a bug report to Mandriva with a solution for that, and some other minor sound/suspend issues.

Once the Ubuntu integration was complete, I submitted the patches through this existing bug report from someone else having the same issue. The solution should help many other people who are stuck with broken sound after suspending their Linux laptops as well.

To Mandriva's credit, they've had this solution for at least a couple of years, it seems, and it hash always been available to Ubuntu to re-use like this.

The PM-Utils project is trying to fix this duplication of effort, by creating a system to handle laptop suspending that many distributions would adopt.

The irony is that the pm-utils doesn't yet include this solution for fixing sound-after-suspend problems. If it continues to miss features that one distribution or the other already offer, they certainly be slow to switch to it as a standard replacement!