Howto: Make Ubuntu 12.04 Hibernate Successfully

Ubuntu has always had problems getting their system to shutdown successfully into a state of hibernation. There’s never been a single solution that fits all machines. With my machines they’ve always been left in a state of a non-responsive black screen, sometimes a blinking white cursor in the top left, but usually pure blackness.

This problem has probably been the case for me since the days of Jaunty Jackalope (9.04), and a fresh install of Precise Pangolin didn’t bring around any form of fix either. On Precise Pangolin (Ubuntu 12.04), the option to hibernate is greyed out on all the power settings, yet ‘suspend’ is available. I prefer hibernation over suspending a session by default, but that’s really splitting hairs.

Checking the forums it seems there isn’t a clear strategy for the Ubuntu guys on how to handle the hibernate/suspend modesin future Ubuntu releases either; some opting for a hardware configuration white-list for these power modes, others pedalling for a black-list.

From piecing together several articles, tips and tutorials, I’ve hopefully found a good work around thats applicable for all hardware combo’s of Ubuntu’s latest release, Precise Pangolin 12.04, yet hopefully should work for other versions too.

Have you been hibernation blacklisted?

First off it seems that the Ubuntu guys have denied everyone the ‘luxury’ of hibernating their system because of its known stability issue with various hardware combinations. Its disabled down at the policykit level.

Whether this is within the mentality of Ubuntu’s ethos, or if it was the best way to bypass the problem, is irrelevant for the purpose of this article, but it might help us fix the problem quite quickly. To see whether hibernation will work once re-enabled, try to execute the following in a terminal window.

sudo pm-hibernate

The system should attempt to hibernate your system. If it shuts down successfully, wait a few seconds and then power the system back on. If your session restores correctly that’s great news, that means hibernation natively works with your system. If it freezes on a black screen (like mine did), or your session doesn’t restore correctly, please jump down to the TuxOnIce section below.

To enable the hibernation options in Ubuntu’s power management setting, execute the following:

sudo nano /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/com.ubuntu.enable-hibernate.pkla

Add this content and save the document:

[Re-enable hibernate by default]
Identity=unix-user:*
Action=org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate
ResultActive=yes

You should then be able to reboot the system and have your hibernation options restored to you! Result.

If this method doesn’t work, or you’re unable to boot back into your desktop, use shell to remove the new policy kit file you just added by running the following command:

sudo rm /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/com.ubuntu.enable-hibernate.pkla

Once that’s deleted, try the TuxOnIce method below.

Patch the kernel with TuxOnIce

TuxOnIce is most easily described as the Linux equivalent of Windows’ hibernate functionality, but better. It saves the contents of memory to disk and powers down. When the computer is started up again, it reloads the contents and the user can continue from where they left off.

TuxOnIce patches the kernel so that the hibernation and suspension modes are handled completely differently for your system. The TuxOnIce site talks into more detail about how this works and which packages were forked from what, but thats far beyond what we need to know. All we need to know is its easy to install, and if it doesn’t work, easy to remove.

To see if we’re able to run TuxOnIce safely we need to make sure we have enough swap space available. Swap space is an area of the hard drive that is set aside specifically for virtual memory. Type the following into terminal:

free

This’ll give a quick breakdown of the memory you’ve got installed, and importantly, how you’ve got it configured.

Here you can see the physical memory, (row beginning with ‘Mem:’), as well as the swap virtual memory. As long as the total column of Swap is greater than the total for Mem you won’t have any problem. If it isn’t, you’ll need to re-address the size of your swap partition. Drop me a message below if you want to know how this is done.

Installing TuxOnIce

So onto installing TuxOnIce. This article mentions how to install TuxOnIce, which can simply be done using apt-get. Add the TuxOnIce package archive to the apt-get repository on your system by executing the following in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tuxonice/ppa

This’ll mean you can pull TuxOnIce from the remote archives. Before you can do so though, you need to update the information on your system. Execute the following:

sudo apt-get update

This’ll update the known packages that you’re system can install. To actually install the kernel patch, run the following apt-get command:

sudo apt-get install tuxonice-userui linux-generic-tuxonice linux-headers-generic-tuxonice

On my machine this actually took a couple of minutes, and I did see some errors regarding TuxOnIce GUI packages, but it seemed to finish without a critical installation error. Now to test whether this worked or not, you should be able to run the same test as mentioned at the very top, executing:

sudo pm-hibernate

Several articles talk of TuxOnIce showing a progress bar of the machine being put into hibernation, however on mine the screen went to its normal black state. Thankfully after about 10 seconds the power light switched off – a great sign!

Turning the machine back on, it loaded straight into my old session, with windows and applications opened as before. It worked! Hibernation on Ubuntu 12.04 thanks to TuxOnIce!

Enabling Ubuntu hibernation

Now that hibernation works, you should be able to modify the policy kit to enable hibernation in Ubuntu’s power options. Execute this command:

sudo nano /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/com.ubuntu.enable-hibernate.pkla

And add this content:

[Re-enable hibernate by default]
Identity=unix-user:*
Action=org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate
ResultActive=yes

After a save and a reboot you should now be able to select hibernation from the power management window.

Hope this has helped, if it did please drop me a comment below, I’d really appreciate the feedback.

The information in this article has been gathered from several sources, hopefully I’ve combined it into a more useful article. Here’s some of the articles I remember using to construct it: The official Ubuntu bug #812394 report, the TuxOnIce kernel patch, installing TuxOnIce.

If this article has helped you I’d really appreciate a share on your favourite choice of social media, or simply a comment of thanks below.