I have a Dell XPS 15 laptop with an external display through the mini-displayport, and I am completely unable to get the suspend functionality working correctly with Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail.
With any of the 3.8 kernels, suspending the computer seems to work correctly for about a half second, and then the fan starts up to full blast, and the activity light stays on (instead of the slow blink that indicates sleep mode).
With 3.9, I can initiate suspend correctly, but the laptop only displays a blank screen upon resume.
The 3.10 kernel suspends and resumes correctly except for the mini-displayport crashing. My external monitor goes into power saving mode after the computer wakes up from suspend and stays that way until I restart the computer, even after restarting lightdm.
3.11 encounters other errors when resuming.
This is getting extremely frustrating. Any help or insight would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Looks like it's the "rapid start" feature that causes problems, it tries to wake up and shut down the computer after a few hours, but it fails in Ubuntu and makes it eat up the battery.
You can disable it in the bios (F12, setup) to fix this, and it should work great - on 13.10.