Fedora Hibernation Woes

Continuing my excursion into suspend and hibernation, I configured my Thinkpad T400 to support that option. Basically that requires ensuring GRUB sees a resume=/dev/sdaX option to find the swap partition and to rebuild the initram, which uses that resume= option to look for appropriate saved contents in the swap partition.

On the laptop I have Fedora 22, CentOS 7, LMDE 2 Betsy, and Slackware 14.1 installed. Hibernation and resuming work great on all but Fedora.

The Fedora system resumes but when the hard drive LED finally stops flickering, I am left with a black screen. Not a black screen of death, just a black screen. I restore the screen by toggling to an alternate console with Ctrl+Alt+Fx and then return to the desktop, which on my system is Ctrl+Alt+F7 with the Light DM login manager. The desktop is restored correctly, just not viewable without the extra console toggling.

Another option is to press Fn+F4 to suspend-to-ram and then resume from sleep. The desktop then is restored.

The Thinkpad wiki has tips for the problem, but why should anybody read all of that dribble to get a basic feature to “just work”? Resume from hibernation works on this laptop with three different distros. Just not Fedora.

My eventual solution was to add the following to an already existing resume-from-sleep script:

    post|resume)
      /bin/chvt 1
      /bin/chvt 7
      ;;

People just want to use their computers.

For many years Fedora had a tarnished reputation as an always broken, bleeding edge distro. With the Fedora 21 release, considerable effort was provided to add sincere polish. I was impressed by Fedora 21, which was my first deep dive into the distro. With Fedora 22 and 23 I am noticing paper cuts creeping into the picture. Browsing the forum and mail lists provides me a similar conclusion. I think, and I am only speculating, that some of Fedora’s original reputation is returning. Too much geek focus at the expense of stability and quality control.

Yet even if I am wrong and my Fedora toe stubbing is little more than corner case problems, the exasperating six month release cycle is something only a minority of people can tolerate and embrace. Such a short life cycle is demanding and exhausting for most users. I do not seem well suited for the pace.

This kind of thing wears me out. Fatigues me. Perhaps Yet Another Proverbial Straw to stop using Fedora.

Posted: February 7, 2016 Category: Usability Tagged: Fedora, General

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