Enabling Hibernate on Ubuntu

Personally I prefer to hibernate all my machines instead of shut them down as I find it more efficient being able to carry on from where I left off than to start a fresh. One annoyance with my Ubuntu installation is that Hibernate is not a first class function and needs some tweaking to get it to work. For my own record this post records what I have done to be able to Hibernate my Ubuntu 20.04 install. All credit to the original post on AskUbuntu.com.

For the actual steps checkout the AskUbuntu post but essentially you need to find the Swap partition (assuming you have one), grabs it UUID and then edit the grub file to update the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT entry to add the resume=UUID=XXXXX-XXX-XXXX-XXXX-YYYYYYYYYY value. Finally update the grub file with “sudo update-grub”.

Once setup you can enter hibernate from the terminal with:

sudo systemctl hibernate

Now you may want to add a shortcut to your desktop or to a hot key to run this command without entering the terminal.

For a desktop shortcut check out this post, where it explains how to create a *.desktop file that will launch the script. Create a text file named e.g. HibernateNow.desktop and then add the content of the file like below, assuming that you have created a bash script with the above “sudo systemctl hibernate” command in it called “hibernatescript.sh” :

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Terminal=true
Name=HibernateNow
Icon=utilities-terminal
Exec=gnome-terminal -e "bash -c './hibernatescript.sh;$SHELL'"
Categories=Application;

Then you can double click the HibernateNow.desktop file and hibernate the machine. Or setup a hotkey for this instead.

Happy hibernating.