Troubleshooting failure to standby/suspend with Ubuntu Netbook Remix on Acer Aspire One

Question

I have an Acer Aspire One netbook, which I'm using with Ubutu Netboox Remix 9.04. With a clean install, suspend seemed to be working fine. However, now that I've installed quite a lot of extra packages and done some configuring (bluetooth dialup, and such), I seem to have lost the suspend functionality.

When I try to go to suspend, the screen only shows a blinking text-mode cursor at the top left corner, and the computer never gets suspended. The only way out is a hard restart.

How can I troubleshoot the issue? For example, are there some specific log files I should be looking at, or such? Since the suspend was working on the clean install (and on the original linpus linux installation that came with the computer) I know this is not an unsolveable hardware compatibility problem. Removing/installing packages one by one would, of course, be an option - but this would be awfully time-consuming, since I have a lot of extra packages and no idea when the problem appeared. As far as I understand, I didn't install anything too weird that might be expected to cause such issues.

EDIT: The new release, Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10, fixed this. I can now suspend the netbook even with the memory extension mounted. This, however, does not work exactly how I'd hope... More information in new thread: Force unmount in Ubuntu, to fix problems after netbook sleep mode

Answer 1

Suspend is known not to work with SD cards inserted. Remove SD cards and other peripherals you may have attached before suspend. There's a good explanation on the Gentoo wiki as to why suspend is problematic with an SD card present: SD Cards and Suspend

If the problem persists, check the logs in /var/log, specifically syslog, messages and Xorg.0.log. There's a handy GUI tool to view the system logs that you can use: System > Administration > Log File Viewer (or something similar).

You should also look at the Ubuntu Community documentation on Acer Aspire One here and here.

Answer 2

There is a wiki post on the Netbook Remix help for the Aspire One which details how to fix this. You add a script that will unmount the cards on sleep, and re-mount them at wake. I implemented this on my Aspire One ZG5 (aoa110-1955) and all is well.

Here are the instructions from that page with some newbie-friendliness baked in:

1 - open the text editor found in Accessories(? I think, don't have the Aspire in front of me), copy/paste the following:

# Drop to: /etc/pm/sleep.d
# Use this script to prevent data loss on mounted MMC/SD
# cards. It syncs data and umounts all mmcblk devices prior to
# suspend, and cancels suspend if umounting was not possible
# (i.e: something locks a file)
case "${1}" in
    hibernate|suspend)
        /bin/sync
        for drive in $( /bin/ls /dev/mmcblk?p* ); do
        /bin/umount ${drive} > /dev/null
        # If umount failed: abort suspend
        if [ $? -gt 0 ]; then
        # Test if device keeps mounted. Previous command could fail
        # (i.e device was not mounted) with a non-stopper
        # problem for the suspend process.
        /bin/mount | /bin/grep ${drive}
        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
            exit 1
        fi
        fi
    done
    ;;
#    resume|thaw)
##       Do nothing. All devices will be automatically mounted again.   
#       ;;
esac

2 - Save as 010_unmount_SD.sh in your Home folder

3 - Open the Terminal (under Accessories)

4 - Use the following command to copy the file to the correct location (you will be prompted for the Admin password when you hit Enter):

sudo cp 010_unmount_SD.sh /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/010_unmount_SD.sh

5 - Set the proper permissions with this command (you will again be prompted for the Admin password):

sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/010_unmount_SD.sh

Just as an aside, I found the rest of the information on that page to be unnecessary as my Video already looks great and power management seems to be functioning as expected. I suspect those fixes were baked into the distro for 9.10.