Suspend/resume. Or in words that non-geeks can understand, sleeping/waking up. It’s one of those things that not just Linux but also BSD and even Windows have been trying to get right for years.

It’s all about standards and drivers, which tend to be non-standard and poorly functioning in a given software environment.

I’ve never had a machine that I’ve used for my day-to-day computing that suspended and resumed properly in Linux. The Lenovo G555 (purchased early 2010) seems to do well with suspend/resume in Windows 7.

And our aging iBook G4 (2003-ish) does suspend/resume like a champ. That’s how it is with Apple’s OS X and their tight control over the hardware on which their software runs. That’s the holy grail for me; suspend/resume is fast, it always works, the network is back up within a couple of seconds.

Even OpenBSD is working on suspend/resume via the ACPI system in most computers these days. I have yet to try OpenBSD 4.8, in which this feature has received a whole lot of work.

But Linux? I haven’t had a whole lot of luck. Not with my Gateway Solo 1450 (now the 7-year-old’s laptop), the Toshiba 1100-S101, or the Lenovo G555. One reason I bought the Lenovo (the main reason being a nexus of “cheap” and “Lenovo”) was that I hoped it would benefit from the connection to Thinkpads of yore, which are traditionally well-supported by free, open-source operating systems.

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If your idea of microblogging isn’t limited to Facebook and Twitter, Identi.ca includes a “group” membership mechanism through which you can more easily follow the kinds of notices that interest you than is possible on Twitter.

Once you join a group, all of the Identi.ca posts that include that group’s identifying tag, a word with an exclamation point before it — as in !Debian, will be included in your regular Identi.ca stream. It’s a great way to both read posts that interest you and to discover other people to follow who you might not have otherwise known about.

By the way, I have Identi.ca feeding Twitter (you can’t do it the other way around), so I’m on both services. It’s complicated enough that I have one source of news feeding Ping.fm, which in turn feeds Twitter, and then Identi.ca and Facebook.

But I use Identi.ca more than any of the others: It’s full of open-source-friendly people.

To see what Debian people are talking about on identi.ca, look at http://identi.ca/group/debian.

All you need to do, once you’re on identi.ca, is put a “bang” (or exclamation point, if you will) in front of the word that names your group.

Like this: !Debian