Comment 65 for bug 318325

NB: With Debian Squeeze, I was able to cure this flicker on my Aspire 5100 by doing the following (as root):

pm-suspend --quirk-s3-bios --quirk-s3-mode --quirk-vbe-post --quirk-vbemode-restore --quirk-vbestate-restore --quirk-test --store-quirks-as-lkw

The parameters up to --quirk-test cause the machine to suspend. When I tap a keyboard key it comes back to the deskop without the flickering.

The --store-quirks-as-lkw parameter seems to cause the previous parameters to be written to a database where they are found and used again on the next suspend attempt. So now my machine suspends and resumes normally (the above commandline was needed only once).

Note that you can use the pm-suspend command to experiment with quirks. The --quirk-test parameter was needed to make sure the pm scripts didn't ignore the other parameters during testing.

For testing quirks, I found it useful to edit the power-management settings to make the machine hibernate when I pushed the power button. That made it possible to recover when the screen flickered too badly to use the normal shutdown dialog. When the machine resumed from hibernation, the flicker was gone and Iwas ready to test another combination of suspend quirks.

Note that I have done a couple of other thngs which I don't think matter (they didn't cure the problem by themselves). These are adding the nomodeset parameter to the linux commandline, and adding some of the same quirks to the file /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/20-video-quirk-pm-acer.fdi.

The current Debian Squeeze appears to be pretty similar to Ubuntu Lucid. It's running Linux 2.6.32-5-686 (but with an October 2011 compile date). I'm not sure how the two systems differ in their power management, but I bet they're pretty close. I do not know if the tweaks I describe here would work for Natty or Onieric.

I hope this helps somebody.