Dienstag, 14. Januar 2014

Enable Hibernation in Linux Mint 16 "Petra" XFCE

Recently I decided to do my ears a favour and bought a new fan for my old Sony 13" laptop. After exchanging the fan, I found the hard disk being too noisy, so I replaced it with a shiny 240 GB SSD as well. I should have done that earlier ...

Nevertheless: time to try a fresh Linux distribution. I installed Linux Mint 16 (based on Ubuntu Saucy 13.10) in the XFCE flavour. Last time I have tried XFCE was in Xubuntu Dapper 6.06 in 2006 -- and its minimalistic UI without any eye candy didn't please me well that time ... But today, I found a very nice UI with a lot of eye candy and none of the annoying stuff that just slows my computer down. Wow!

After a short testing time, I decided that XFCE was a good decision. However, I missed a critical feature: hibernation or suspend to disk. No idea why, but this is no longer enabled by default in Ubuntu and derivates.

After successfully shutting down my laptop with sudo pm-hibernate, it did not wake up properly, but just rebooted into the standard login. The first lession I learned was that Mint crypted my swap space using a random password, because I enabled encryption for my home directory during the installation. Not good.

Digging through a plethora of tutorials and descriptions, I found the right one: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/E...
I followed the steps as described, except for step 10, which is useless on XFCE.

After rebooting, Mint asks for a password, decrypts swap, restores the recovery image or continues booting. Nice. But one final thing was missing: hibernation was missing in the log out dialogue. On a terminal, type: sudo nano /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/com.ubuntu.enable-hibernate.pkla and add the second block as described below:

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

[Re-enable hibernate by default in logind]
Identity=unix-user:*
Action=org.freedesktop.login1.hibernate
ResultActive=yes

After saving the changes, the log out dialogue shows the hibernation button again.