Need to suspend or hibernate

[fletcher08]

I've been running Linux for a little less than a year, and I have never been able to suspend or hibernate one of the computers it is on. (I would also like to know which uses less power, suspend or hibernate.)

The computer I am having trouble with is a Dell, with an Intel processor. When I run inxi in terminal, I get the following:

CPU[-Single core Intel Pentium 4 (HT) clocked at 2992.335 Mhz-] Kernel[-2.6.28-11-generic i686-] Up[-22 min-] Mem[-230.8/488.1MB-] HDD[-80.0GB(5.4% used)-] Procs[-122-] Client[-Shell-] inxi[-1.0.6-]

Running inxi -p I get:

Partition: ID:/ size: 72G used: 4.0G (6%) ID:swap-1 size: 1.50GB used: 0.00GB (0%)

And I can run lspci if someone needs it, but the output is long.

So can anyone tell from that if a particular distro or desktop will run better on this machine? I am running Linux Mint 8 XFCE CE on it right now, but it will not suspend or hibernate, as I said. I am wondering if there is some distro, or desktop environment, that would be more compatible with my hardware.

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.

P.S. I really need an OS that is under 700MB because this computer does not have a DVD reader.

[trutheality]

When you say you can't suspend or hibernate the computer, is that because you tried and it somehow failed, or because you don't see the option?

Mint should be able to suspend and hibernate...

[fletcher08]

I know that Mint should work fine. It works fine on my computer (although I am running Mint 8 LXDE CE now, Mint 7 would not suspend on my machine). My machine is newer and runs on an AMD Athlon 64. So I wonder if it is a hardware issue.

I switched the Dell to Fedora 11 today, but I am having issues with the Internet browsers on it, as none of them will connect to the Internet, even though the computer is connected, as evidenced by the fact that I can download packages and updates. I have a post in the Fedora forum about that.