I recently mentioned that I had installed Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on my Dell D820 and that it was working mostly fine, except for the hibernate functionality.
Last Monday (Dec. 22nd), the mainboard on my D820 died. Fortunately, it was still under warranty, so I called Dell Service the next morning and on the afternoon of the 24th someone came by and replaced the board. Definitely a lot speedier than I expected and it was a very nice touch.
Anyway, couple of days later I figured out why hibernate didn’t work: I had no swap partition at all! I had simply ignored it when installing Ubuntu because I wasn’t sure if I was going to keep it that way or format it later to install something else.
So I fired up GParted, added a new swap partition and enabled it, roughly following this guide, properly adjusted to my system.
After that, I just needed to edit my GRUB configuration (/boot/grub/menu.lst) so that the kernel boot options included the “resume” option pointing to the new swap partition (in my case, “resume=/dev/sda4”).
For the most part, seems to be working nicely now. I still wish the system had just issued a warning or error when I tried to hibernate it without an active swap partition. I mean, if it’s not supposed to work, it shouldn’t fail so miserably.
