Dell Studio 17″ 1749 – Ubuntu linux suspend and hibernate problems

I have a really awesome Dell studio 17″ laptop. It works brilliantly with Ubuntu since the day i got it, however during an upgrade at sometime, it suddenly stopped suspending and hibernating.

This was annoying more than anything, but still fine. I hunted for months high and low for an answer, and could find nothing in any log files. I saw many complaints and bugfixes of which non seemed to work.

The machine suspended fine, it just never came back from that. It sat with a blank screen until i power cycled it to get it going.

So, i had 4 days off work, and decided to get to the bottom of this silly bug. I could only assume that it was something preventing it from resuming, either kernel, module, or software.

Again, nothing in the logs anywhere. Finally i stumbled over this bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/748994

In the comments the following fix worked brilliantly for me.

Steps:

1. Create new file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-suspend.conf with the following two lines:

blacklist firewire_core
blacklist firewire_ohci

2. Run: sudo update-initramfs -u

3. Reboot and check that the modules were not loaded by running: lsmod | grep firewire

4. Suspend the machine and bring it back up.

5. Hibernate the machine and bring it back up.

Both suspend and hibernate work now.

5 Replies to “Dell Studio 17″ 1749 – Ubuntu linux suspend and hibernate problems”

  1. So just a dodgy firewire module, how annoying. Have you ever used firewire on your machine?

    I’ve used it once with a DV camera and a couple of times to do Mac to Mac repairs or filesystem cloning. I’d certainly rather have the mild inconvenience of having to remember to load and unload the firewire module when using the port to have working sleep. Back in the day if you moved all the scripts and config files related to APM and PCMCIA into a ramdisk you could get absurdly fast wake/sleep. My old 1999 Compaq laptop was able to wake from sleep in less than 3 seconds because it could process all that crap before the hard drive spun up.

  2. Hmmm… doesn’t work for me. Both suspend and hibernate work, but coming back up always reboots. This seems to be due to a recent update…

    Of course, I’m running 10.04 so it could be a different bug.

    1. Hmm could be a different bug. Mine never rebooted, mine just hung with a blank/black screen when coming back up. I moved to Linux Mint in anycase because i could not stand Unity and was having random crashes for some reason on Ubuntu (unsure why, but frustrating!)

  3. This suspend problem has been plaguing me for months.  You fix works perfectly and I now have an Inspiron Studio that suspends and resumes 🙂

    Thanks!

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