Hibernation woes

[Derek Broughton]

Ted Hilts wrote:

> I also, along with some others in the list, have had problems with
> "hibernation". At first it worked but complained during power up that it
> did not work -- but it did! 

Any possibility that you had more than one swap ?  Any possibility that you
had a "resume" device specified in your /boot/grub/menu.lst?  Either one
could cause it to tell you it didn't find your hibernation image, but then
have it find your hibernation image at a fallback location.

> Now, since I have been extensively using VNC 
> it won't hibernate at all. When it did work (before using VNC) it
> complained about 2 things, and now it fails and brings up a flat
> rectangular grey box asking for my password after which it resumes from
> where it left off. 

You have to have enough swap space to store your memory.

> I tried looking at the bash or bash like files that 
> control "hibernate" but I could not figure it out. The one thing that is
> now different is that it seems to fail after not being able to find a
> "swap" area. It seems to be looking for the swap area (probably for
> temporary storage). 

Probably for _all_ your storage.  You can't hibernate without swap (well,
that might not be _strictly_ true, but not with the default hibernation,
anyway).  

What does "swapon -s" say"?

> I really like Ubuntu but maybe it is progressing too fast as a
> distribution and not enough testing has been involved. 

Not at all.  You have the answer in front of you, and you complain that
Ubuntu doesn't work.

> In my opinion the 
> hibernation function has not been comprehensively tested or the "bug"
> would not occur -- and it is certainly a bug! 

It certainly isn't likely.  _If_ you have a swap partition, and _if_ you
don't have anything in your grub config to send it looking for the wrong
partition, there could be a bug, but I'm betting on one of those two
problems - and that's user initiated error.
-- 
derek