How to enable hibernation in 16.04

Question

I have lost the to me essential hibernate functionality after upgrading ubuntu. This is normal, but unfortunately I could not reenable it this time.

I tried these three previous solutions:

• setting 3 entries in /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/com.ubuntu.disable-suspend.pkla,
• setting two entries in /etc/pm/sleep.d/20_custom-ehci_hcd, and
• enabling two entries in /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/10-vendor.d/com.ubuntu.desktop.pkla plus restarting the menu/indicators and rebooting

but no hibernation option appears.

Some additional info:

• sudo pm-hibernate outputs nothing and appears to do nothing.

• sudo s2disk outputs:

  s2disk: Could not open the snapshot device. Reason: Operation not permitted

I guess this is my key clue, but I didn't find any obvious explanations/solutions when googling that - I'm afraid I'm ignorant of the meaning.

There is no change to dmesg output and /var/log/pm-suspend.log does not exist after running pm-hibernate.

The machine is capable of hibernating under ubuntu 15.04 and earlier - the above options worked previously.

(I am aware this is a potential duplicate of this question, but wanted to add more detail.)

Answer 1

You need to disable Secure Boot if you are using UEFI.

With Secure Boot enabled hibernation is disabled for security reasons.

Answer 2

In terminal, try sudo systemctl hibernate. If the system is able to do so, i.e. has enough swap space, it should work. Use of this command requires a password, which is not necessarily a bad thing, because it makes one pause to consider that the current system state is being recorded to a possibly-unencrypted HDD.

To make a Hibernate keyboard shortcut:

• Press System and type key.
• Select Keyboard settings.
• on the Shortcuts tab, add to Custom Shortcuts the command systemctl hibernate and set a key combination. Note that sudo is not used here, though a password is requested when using the shortcut.