I’m one of those people who hates having to shutdown machines, then restart them, and start logging into all my sites all over again, so I’m particularly thankful for hibernation functionality.

On Ubuntu (possibly Debian as well, but I haven’t checked), you can install either (or both) of the hibernate package, or the TuxOnIce-enabled kernel.

Hibernate is a script that detects whether or not you have a TOI-enabled kernel, and if you have such a kernel, it will use the TOI routines.

Hibernate worked perfectly for me, until I started using BOINC. Then, hibernation would hang with my laptop in a “limbo” state. Neither fully on, nor fully powered off. Turns out that BOINC must be either hogging the memory, or not releasing it properly. So, instead of doing

sudo hibernate

I do this

sudo service boinc-client stop sudo hibernate -k sudo service boinc-client start

So I stop the BOINC service (freeing up memory and CPU cycles), then I do the hibernate (allowing it to kill processes if needed), and then I startup the BOINC service again. The last line only gets executed upon resuming.

Some information I found off the web:

First type:

cat /sys/power/state

If the result line contains “mem”, you can use this to suspend to RAM: sudo pm-suspend

If the result line contains “disk”, you can also use this to suspend to disk (hibernate): sudo pm-hibernate

If you have both results, you can use this to suspend with a hibernate backup. In other words, your system will prepare for hibernation, but only suspend, not turn off. This will use a bit of power, but means that it’s faster to resume, and if your battery runs out, it’ll use the hibernate image as backup. sudo pm-suspend-hybrid

You can pipe the hibernation into a timed job using the at command. This will hibernate in one hour from now echo ‘pm-hibernate’ | sudo at now + 60 minutes

And you can confirm the job is present: sudo at -l 10 Wed Jan 1 12:38:00 2014 a root

Suspend/Hibernate requires root access, hence the reason I did sudo before the at command

I have been wanting to upgrade my laptop for a long while but have been putting off. Now my decision has somewhat been pushed. I’ll need to upgrade it to handle some of my work from the office and the software I need to use is really going to struggle on my current hardware.