I have been using Linux for years now and I have never been able to succesfully use either sleep or hibernate on any distro that I used.

When I try to wake up Linux the screen stays black and I couldn't do anything except press on the power button to turn off the laptop.

They hibernate option is not found in my start menu.

I am using Mandriva 2011 on my laptop Acer Extensa 5220

I do not know what information should I provide so please tell me what you need to know.

Hi,

check that pm-utils is installed, an that you try hibernating using it, because it contains some "hooks" (read workarounds) for problematic devices/drivers.

I personnally switched to using Tuxonice and its hibernate-script about two years back, and have never looked back since.Do you have swap enabled? If you don't, you will not be able to hibernate to swap (and upower oesn't allow an override to hibernate to file if using tuxonice)

Thank you serafean,
I do not have a swap partition right now but I am planning to assign one soon.

Your reply was about hibernation, can you help me with the sleep issue

The pm-utils part is also relevant to the sleep issue.
Also check in the BIOS that S2/S3 sleep is enabled.
I suggest disabling/disconnecting all possible devices, and putting the computer to sleep. This means killing X, unloading all graphic drivers (not using KMS), all usb drivers etc until only the bare minimum is loaded. Then suspending. If it works, try adding devices and drivers one by one until it breaks, and then blacklist it. If this doesn't work Trying a different distro is an option, it might have some more quirks in its database... (the liveCD is enough).


Serafean

sorry I forgot to mention that pm-utils is available and installed

I searched a little and came by this page:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/add-rem...ernel-modules/

the process did not seem so friendly and frankly I am afraid to remove things that I can not add again.

what would you recommend for me to do?

Friendliness : indeed, you will have to drop to text mode, and input commands there, as well a sknow your hardware and related modules pretty well.
"lsmod" will show all loaded modules. "rmmod foo" will unload the module named foo; notice I don't use the term remove, but unload. Indeed, when you unload a module, it's only disabled, not removed. A simple reboot will reload all necessary modules, as well as "modprobe foo" will load the module foo.

If you don't trust the security of this operation, logout your regular user, drop to a tty console (ctrl-alt-f1 should get you there) and unmount your home partition. This will ensure that none of your data will be lost.

I just thought of another thing you might try : check in your BIOS if there is an option like "POST on resume". This option forces the graphic card to go through at least a part of its boot process.

Serafean

Hi, i do not use mandriva, but on my laptop, i upgraded my kernel to 2.6.39 and my sleep and hibernate work perfectly now. Not meaning to rub it in or anything. Just wondering if suspend & hibernate work with any other distros.

Well, sorry for the late feedback, but I found that the unloading modules is a tiresome process so I decided not to continue with it until I assign a swap partition, and I am too busy to do so at the time being

@Knightron
I have a slightly older kernel
I haven't updated a kernel yet, but if I have some time I might look into it.
Thanks

that kernel isn't to old. I am unfamiliar with your laptop but newer laptops may need newer kernels. Serafean seems to know what they're talking about, so take there advice over mine. I was just wondering if you'd gotten it to work at all, as different distros do different things and once you know it works with atleast one distro, it may become easier to start nailing down what to do in mandriva.