1. Introduction

1.1 What is TuxOnIce?

TuxOnIce is a patch which enhances the ability of Linux to take a snapshot of the state of a computer's memory and save it to disk, and restore that image later. This allows you to fully power down a computer at an arbitrary point in time and not need to reload programs and reopen documents on power-up. In modern laptops, hibernation is not done by the BIOS. They use ACPI and ask the operating system to do most of the job. If you can't satisfy yourself with standby mode (suspend to RAM) because you leave your computer in suspend mode for too long (or because you're not using a 2.5 or later kernel and therefore lack suspend-to-RAM support), then you have to hibernate.

1.2 Copyright (skip this if you're in a hurry)

This document is an update by Bernard Blackham and Nigel Cunningham of the original howto, Copyright (c) 2002 by Florent Chabaud. It is currently maintained by Bernard Blackham. You may freely copy and distribute (sell or give away) this document in any format. Send any corrections and comments to the document maintainer. You may create a derivative work and distribute it provided that:

1. If it's not a translation, email a copy of your derivative work to the author(s) and maintainer (could be the same person).
2. License the derivative work in the spirit of this license or use GPL. Include a copyright notice and at least a pointer to the license used.
3. Give due credit to previous authors and major contributors.

1.3 Why was this document written?

TuxOnIce (previously known as Suspend2) has a long story, but for a long time it was considered as alpha. This is mainly due to the fact that hibernation has to deal with a lot of aspects in kernel. It is therefore difficult to follow the kernel development (for instance transition from 2.2 to 2.4 was not straightforward). The 2.6 patches are now considered stable. Installing, configuring and using hibernation support is not straightforward, since it involves recompiling the kernel and setting some boot parameters. TuxOnIce's website is at http://www.tuxonice.net with mirrors around the globe. You can download scripts and updated patches at http://www.tuxonice.net/downloads/.

You may want to peruse the FAQ also.