[PLUG] System suspend every 15 seconds on old laptop

[Greg Helledy <gregsonh@gra-inc.com>]

I have a Dell Inspiron 700m laptop.  It's about 15 years old with a 
Pentium M CPU.  It ran Linux Mint 13 for years, but that's no longer 
updated.  I decided to install Q4OS, a Debian derivative that focuses on 
being lightweight.

https://q4os.org/

It ran fine as a live CD, but once I installed it, it would go into 
suspend mode every 15 seconds.  In the bug section on Sourceforge, I 
noticed someone else had the same problem.  It's very difficult to try 
to do diagnostics on a machine shutting down every 15 seconds, so I 
looked for another lightweight distro and decided to try Lubuntu.

Exact same result...live CD works fine, but once installed, suspend is 
triggered after 15 seconds of uptime.

Q4OS 2.5 uses kernel 4.9.88
Lubuntu 18.04 uses kernel 4.15
Mint 13 used some form of kernel 3.0

The quirk about this CPU is that it reports that it is non-PAE to the 
OS, although it is.  To boot the live CD of Q4OS or Lubuntu, you have to 
add the "forcepae" option.  The installations didn't offer me the 
opportunity to enter anything about PAE, and appear to work fine except 
for "falling asleep" constantly.

I don't have a lot of time to play around with this, but I would like to 
get my old laptop working again.  Do you think there might be a quick 
way to disable whatever's triggering this?  Otherwise, what distro would 
you try next?  I have 1.5 GB RAM and 80 GB of HDD available.

--
Greg Helledy
GRA, Incorporated
P:  +1 215-884-7500
F:  +1 215-884-1385
www.gra.aero
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