10.04 LTS "hibernate" doesn't

[Objekt]

What is the deal with Ubuntu and power states? "Suspend" and "Hibernate" don't do anything. Whether I invoke one manually, the most that happens is that my screen goes blank. The monitor does not go to standby, my hard drives don't spin down, and the machine doesn't go into standby.

Whenever I try to start the "Power Management" applet (System->Preferences->Power Management), it seems to hang. Takes a long time - up to a couple of minutes - for a window to appear.

I also just noticed that one of my HDD's seems to be running constantly, even though I'm not moving any files around. Not sure where to start straightening things out.

[yetiman64]

What is the deal with Ubuntu and power states? "Suspend" and "Hibernate" don't do anything. Whether I invoke one manually, the most that happens is that my screen goes blank. The monitor does not go to standby, my hard drives don't spin down, and the machine doesn't go into standby.

Whenever I try to start the "Power Management" applet (System->Preferences->Power Management), it seems to hang. Takes a long time - up to a couple of minutes - for a window to appear.

I also just noticed that one of my HDD's seems to be running constantly, even though I'm not moving any files around. Not sure where to start straightening things out.

To hibernate an Ubuntu install you need to have a swap partition as big or slightly larger the the amount of RAM you have installed.

Could you please run the command below in a terminal and post the output back here,

free

. This will give out how much swap and RAM you have available.

[Objekt]

What about "suspend?" That should work regardless of the swap size, shouldn't it?

[yetiman64]

What about "suspend?" That should work regardless of the swap size, shouldn't it?

I'm not sure about that at this stage.

First up, how much swap did you allocate ? Your sig indicates you use 4 GB RAM.

If you don't know, the command given in my first post will tell you that and how much RAM as well (even if only to rule it out as an issue).

Questions about not hibernating are usually related to swap size in here (but not always, sure you could have some other situation at work, but it would be best to rule this out first).

Your swap size ? (run the command if you don't immediately know and copy and paste the output to your editor for checking here - use code tags please.)

Edit: tekstr1der's comments below (post 5) sound right. You may also consider doing a check on you RAM with memtest. It's available from the grub boot screen (use the shift key during booting to access the grub boot screen if you only have 1 OS installed).

[tekstr1der]

What about "suspend?" That should work regardless of the swap size, shouldn't it?

Suspend works regardless if a swap partition is defined as it's stored to memory (RAM). Hibernation requires HDD space allocated.

[Objekt]

Whatever problem I was having yesterday was apparently temporary. I had to reboot a few times & mess around with Windows 7 a bit for unrelated reasons. Now I don't have a HDD running constantly. That worries me; it probably means one of my HDD's is about to die, but I haven't figured out which one, yet. But, the power-saving functions will now sort-of work.

Now at least "Suspend" seems to work - partially. The machine indeed goes to "sleep." But I have to press the power button "wake" it. Is there any way to have "Suspend" cancelled by a keyboard or mouse movement (i.e. USB input)?

As for "Hibernate":

user4@user4-desktop:~$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       4117340     667052    3450288          0      43460     285968
-/+ buffers/cache:     337624    3779716
Swap:       877560          0     877560

"Hibernate" now works a little bit, but not really. When I use it, the machine shuts down, but it does not resume properly. Let's say I put the machine in "Hibernate," then want to wake it up. I press the power button and...the machine restarts, as if I had done a reboot. I then have to log in, and it's as if I am in a fresh session of GDM. None of the apps I had open when I put the machine in Hibernation are open.

[VenyoZ]

To hibernate an Ubuntu install you need to have a swap partition as big or slightly larger the the amount of RAM you have installed.

Could you please run the command below in a terminal and post the output back here,

free

. This will give out how much swap and RAM you have available.

Not really as big as the amount of RAM, you have to have double the amount of the installed RAM at least to get full performance.

[varunendra]

Now at least "Suspend" seems to work - partially. The machine indeed goes to "sleep." But I have to press the power button "wake" it. Is there any way to have "Suspend" cancelled by a keyboard or mouse movement (i.e. USB input)?

As for "Hibernate":

user4@user4-desktop:~$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       4117340     667052    3450288          0      43460     285968
-/+ buffers/cache:     337624    3779716
Swap:       877560          0     877560

"Hibernate" now works a little bit, but not really. When I use it, the machine shuts down, but it does not resume properly. Let's say I put the machine in "Hibernate," then want to wake it up. I press the power button and...the machine restarts, as if I had done a reboot. I then have to log in, and it's as if I am in a fresh session of GDM. None of the apps I had open when I put the machine in Hibernation are open.

Well, your swap space is apparently less than a GB, try expanding it to 4+ GB and see if hibernate works.
As for advance power management features like setting wake-up actions, I guess only KDE has those features by default. Can't say if there's some workaround in GDE.

Not really as big as the amount of RAM, you have to have double the amount of the installed RAM at least to get full performance.

@VenyoZ,
Can you mention your source of that information please?
AFAIK, the "double amount" thing applies only when there's less than 2GB RAM, and even that depends on the type of system usage. If there's a lightweight distro you are using, with no heavy apps, then even 1GB RAM with no swap (& thus no hibernation) will deliver great performance!

PS:
Actually, deciding the amount of swap is not a complex issue, but can't be generalized either. A general rule IMHO would be: 1) 'upto 2GB' for systems with less than 2GB RAM, 2) same for higher amounts of RAM if no hibernation is required, and 3) slightly higher than RAM if hibernation is required.

[Objekt]

I will have to play with GParted a bit to get enough swap space. Hibernate is more of a "nice to have" for my desktop machine but rather important for e.g. a netbook. Next time I put Ubuntu on my netbook, I will have to make a point of allocating plenty of swap.

Hmm...I don't think this will be so simple. Ubuntu won't let me unmount /home so I can resize its partition.

Also occurs to me that resizing /home may change the partition's UUID, meaning /home would not get mounted during startup. That could be a problem.

I backed up everything important in my /home folder (a few docs, application settings, etc.). But I'm not sure what will happen if, for instance, I boot into the Gparted Live CD and resize the partition /home is on from there.

[yetiman64]

Not really as big as the amount of RAM, you have to have double the amount of the installed RAM at least to get full performance.

Old information, please check https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq

How much swap do I need?

As a base minimum, it's highly recommended that the swap space should be equal to the amount of physical memory (RAM). Also, it's recommended that the swap space is twice the amount of physical memory (RAM) depending upon the amount of hard disk space available for the system (although this "recommendation" dates back from a time when physical RAM was very expensive and most Unix systems ran with many processes in swap space - a situation that hardly applies in most situations these days, but ancient Unix/Linux myths like this "recommendation" tend to survive well past their "use by" dates).

Bolding by me, for easier recognition.

OP, varunendra has already pointed out your hibernate problem and if you address that you will be better off. If you can't turn off swap or unmount a partition with the live-cd, sometimes that happens, you could consider using the latest stable gparted live-cd. Link for it is below.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/

Also occurs to me that resizing /home may change the partition's UUID, meaning /home would not get mounted during startup. That could be a problem.

After you make the changes, boot up the Ubuntu live cd, mount the partition and edit /etc/fstab as root (gksu gedit /<your-installs-mounted-path>/etc/fstab), changed the UUIDs for any altered partition to suit before booting the installation itself.

You can find all UUIDS for mounted partitions with the command

sudo blkid -c /dev/null

Edit: if you copy and paste from this output be carefull not to copy the leading and trailing quotation marks it uses, they will make fstab choke