Hibernate LInux Mint 10

[murray654]

Hi,

I am new to linux, and I am running Linux Mint 10 on my old PC. How do I get the computer to hibernate? Currently if I select hibernate from the quit menu, the computer screen goes blank, after some disk activity, the computer is still running, and no further disk activity. I figure that the computer is ready to switch off. But when I switch back on, mint boots up, there is no session hibernated...

CPU is AMD Athlon XP 3000+
1024mb RAM
Gigabyte 7VT600-P-RZ motherboard
Seagate 200 gig HDD

I suspect possibly I dont have enough free disk space to hibernate. About 7GB free. Thats strange, I thought I only need 1GB free disk space to hibernate.

Is there any way to make the hibernate function work?

 

[Ockie]

mmmm I have never actually tried to hibernate my laptop. I am on linux mint 11 though. Will give it a shot just now.

 

[Ockie]

Just tested it and worked fine. Laptop powered down completely. When I switched back on it booted into my last session with my brower open and a test folder I left open. Perhaps switch to Linux Mint 11?

I have a Compaq CQ60 Laptop

 

[ponder]

Do you have a Swap partition and how big is it?

 

[murray654]

Not sure, where do I look for partition info? I would google this, but my connection is GPRS, really slow...

 

[MyWorld]

Open a terminal and type in:
free

This should give you the stats of your memory and swap.

EDIT:
You need at least 2x the swap space compare to your RAM, so it should be in the 2Gb region.
The reason for the swap question is that your disk state gets saved to swap (on the hard drive) and if there is too little swap it will fail.

In the past we had incompatibility with kernel drivers and various motherboards, so lets take it a step at a time ans see what we come up with.

 

[murray654]

Hi MyWorld,

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1025704 925664 100040 0 83244 342596
-/+ buffers/cache: 499824 525880
Swap: 3069948 0 3069948

The swap is 3GB and the memory is only 1GB

Should I install the available updates and see if that fixes it? There are 84MB updates available, but on my GPRS this will take a few days, which is why I have not bothered. Right now it is busy downloading a 374kb fil: this has taken about 15 minutes and is only 50% done.

 

[MyWorld]

It seems that were a select few people who had trouble with hibernation in Mint 10, and some of the reported the problem fixed in Mint 11 without giving details as to what was broken in the first place.

I did however find a couple of things for you to try, if this does not work you can PM me your address and I'll post you a Mint 11 DVD.

This is going to be daunting for you as a newbie to Linux, so tell me if you are up to it:
http://thecodecentral.com/2011/01/18/fix-ubuntu-10-10-suspendhibernate-not-working-bug

 

[murray654]

OK, I followed the instructions.

First time I hibernated, there was a lot of activity, the screen saver started running and the screen flicked on and off a few times. Then the screensaver was back on.

I moved the mouse to wake the computer and was asked for my password. So it locked the computer instead of hibernating. I tried again.

This time text appeared on the screen "not enough memory to create hibernation image" or something like that.

It proceeded to hibernate, and the computer powered down. And when I restarted it indeed restored itself to the same state it was in before hibernation I had closed everything except firefox before hibernation. That text I saw must have been the result of the first failed attempt.

I think I will try a few more times to see if that problem was once off.

 

[murray654]

Hi MyWorld,

I have done a few more tests. It seems half the time the computer fails to hibernate, and locks the computer instead; in which case I unlock the computer and then the 2nd time it does hibernate. This is a great improvement. Not ideal, but an improvement none the less.

I have written down the error message:
"Not enough free memory
Error -12 creating hibernation image"

The error is shown when the computer successfully enters hibernation, so I am not sure what it means.

Thanks.

 

[MyWorld]

It seems related to the older Mint 10, PM me your details and I'll send you Linux Mint 11.

It should be better than hacking the system.

 

[murray654]

It seems related to the older Mint 10, PM me your details and I'll send you Linux Mint 11.

It should be better than hacking the system.

Thanks. I did manage to download the mint 11 cd at work where we have a faster connection. I have not installed it because I only have 7GB free. I have to delete some data...