I recently managed to acquire an EEE 901 netbook. I like it very much, and of course I installed Ubuntu on it (having briefly experimented with Crunch Bang Linux). Hibernation was disabled by default. This is how I solved that little problem:

Enabling hibernation at the system level.

First, i followed this guide. Condensed, it says:

1. See if hibernation works. UseAlt+F2 to open the “run” dialog, and then type “gksudo pm-hibernate”. Press enter, type in your password and press enter again. The system should now go into hibernation mode. Try to restart it. If all seems well, proceed to step 2 below. You’ll need to make sure to have a swap partition (or file) as large as your amount of RAM for any of this to work, by the way.

2. Call up the “run” dialog again. This time, type “gksu gedit /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/com.ubuntu.enable-hibernate.pkla”. Add these lines:

[Enable Hibernate]
 Identity=unix-user:*
 Action=org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate
 ResultActive=yes

Save and exit. Possibly use Alt+F2 and “restart” to restart the Gnome shell.

Now, you should be able to select hibernation in power options etc. It has been enabled at the system level. But still there is no menu option!

Getting a graphical “hibernation” option

I began by installing the “alternative status menu” extension. According to its description, it should have given me a “Hibernate” option. Alas, it did not. Seems like newer versions of the extension needs a bit of prodding. YMMV.

I poked around a bit, and found out that the extension actually had some hidden options, not accessible through either gconf-editor, dconf-editor or any other means besides manual editing.

Open a terminal window using Ctrl+Alt+T, for instance.

Go to the directory where the settings are (split into three lines for readability:

cd ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/
cd ./alternative-status-menu@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com/
cd ./schemas/

Open up the settings file:

gksudo gedit ./org.gnome.shell.extensions.alternative-status-menu.gschema.xml

Find this part:

<key type="b" name="allow-hibernate">
 <default>false</default>
 <summary>Enable hibernating</summary>
 <description>Control the visibility of the Hibernate menu item</description>
</key>

Change “false” to “true”. Save the file, then exit.

And now, because someone decided it shouldn’t be that easy, the schema needs to be “compiled”. Type:

glib-compile-schemas ./

And press enter. Use Alt+F2 to run the “restart” command. This should reload the Gnome shell.

Now, hopefully, there should be a “hibernate” command in your status menu…