"Suspend failed" message gives false advice

Hi Matthew
Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you please try with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Hardy Heron?

Thanks in advance.

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!.

I don't personally experience the problem in Hardy, but that's not relevant to this bug report. As shown in <https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/+source/gnome-power-manager/+pots/gnome-power-manager/ro/401/+translate>, the unhelpful string is still present in gnome-power-manager. Therefore the bug still exists.

However I do experience the bug.

My HP 6710b goes to sleep after closing the lid. After waking up I see that nonsens message (I mean - it went to sleep, right?).

What's gnome-power-manager's problem here exactly? Why does it think the machine couldn't sleep?

Next problem, the original reporter suggest searching the help center for "suspend failure". That however doesn't turn up anything here. Might be that is because I have some kind of partially translated (into German) help center.

Further on I have experienced "Pedro Villavicencio"'s robo-answer once allready. I don't think it's useful at all. Either there's a bug or not. Just closing bugs after very superficial checking because of lack of traffic doesn't make them magically disapear. The robo-answer tastes spammy and asks for similar spammy bugreports without humain brain intervention. You know the kind of I've got a problem, that is being autoclosed after superficial checking, then hey I'll make a bot that will auto-reopen after very superficial checking (if person_who_closed(bug) =="Pedro Villavicencio") then reopen(bug)) .
*t

(The problem Tomas experienced is bug 93281, not this bug. And nowhere did I suggest that the message shouldn't be translated.)

On Sun, 2008-04-13 at 21:25 +0000, Tomas Pospisek wrote:
> What's gnome-power-manager's problem here exactly? Why does it think the
> machine couldn't sleep?

Because HAL told it so. If HAL tells GPM there is an error sleeping, it
reports it to the user, simple as that. HAL and pm-utils determine it
through a variety of means, but the likely cause is the BIOS put things
in a way that they didn't expect. That bug is separate from this one,
and is largely hardware specific.

I'm still experiencing this bug with Hardy Beta with all updates on my Dell Inspiron 6400/E1505. Other bugreports for the same problem:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-power-manager/+bug/199088
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-power-manager/+bug/161216

The bug is a bad error message; it's still in Hardy. It's surprising that the response to a documentation bug report with contains a suggested fix is "is this still an issue for you in the latest release?" It would have been easy to check the source, as Matthew Paul Thomas did in this ticket.

I don't mean to be rude, but just fix the error message, please.

I have this problem too.(With Gutsy)

But I checked out the user.log.0 file and it seems like this message only appears when I wake up the system(by pressing power button).

(When I suspend my PC, it works very well and no log in user.log.0 or message.log.0)

May 28 08:55:26 hong gnome-power-manager: (jacinto) Resuming computer
May 28 08:55:26 hong gnome-power-manager: (jacinto) suspend failed

Nothing more logged before Resuming computer. So I guess it does suspend well, it shouldn't appear this "Suspend failed" message. What should I do to get rid of this message, or it is a bug to be fixed?

I get that error message regularly in Hardy 8.04. "Your computer failed to suspend. Check the help file for common problems." It's definitely a low priority because it doesn't actually seem to affect function. But what irritates me is that "check help file" business.

WHICH HELP FILE? Maybe the term "help file" could be made into a link to the right one. Or it could be turned into the full path to the relevant file. The way it is, it's just frustrating.

By the way, I didn't get that message in Gutsy or Feisty. Instead the system just crashed. So this is an improvement :D

This is probably a dup of bug #161216 (or the other way around). Can someone decide and set it accordingly?

They are not duplicates. This bug could be fixed with a simple string change, but bug 161216 would require more complex work.

I agree with the original post.

The current message in Hardy Heron is the same as before;
  Your computer failed to suspend.
  Check the help file for common
  problems.

The message as it stands makes me think that there is a user level log file called the help file.
I should check this log file for common problems that it will tell me about.
My expectation is that there are complex problems that are not reported in the help file.

I too when looking for this ubuntu help log file. I searched the internet for hints. This bug is
the only relevant link I found.

The key to the misunderstanding is the word check. It means verify. Verify the help file for problems.

All that is required is to fix the wording. Recommended wording;

"Your comupter failed to suspend.
 Common solutions may be found by
 searching in system, help and support."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pause to check out the help pages.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unfortunately searching in System.Help and support produces the following;

"3.1.1. Fixing problems with suspending, hibernating and resuming
 If your computer cannot suspend, hibernate or resume properly, there may be a number of things that you can try to
 get it working correctly.
    * Check the test report for your laptop, if one has been made (see Section 3.4 ― Finding laptop testing reports).
    * Ask for assistance through an Ubuntu support channel."

If you follow the "finding laptop testing reports" link you will discover that it is a circular reference and will bring you back to this page again. Of the number of things that you can try(2) the first doesn't work and the second is.... (be polite)

And that is it. So really this message pointed to the help file because there was nothing else to say.
Given this I'm now thinking that the message should be;

"Sleep Problem
 Your computer failed to suspend.
 Do not rely on just closing the lid
 to save battery power until the
 problem has been resolved.
 Hibernating using the off switch
 will probably work however."

I just had the exact same experience... suspended, resumed, saw goofy message and began searching help files. The message leads to nowhere.

I also just had the exact same experience... (sorry, no suggestions here; completely new to Linux but very impressed by UBUNTU)

I can also confirm the same problem here. Im running Hardy on Dell E1505 with Intel915 Graphics card. I manually suspend my computer (closing the lid does not do anything for me) and it seems to suspend successfully, but when I press the power button to wake it up, it pops up this error message

Your computer failed to suspend.
 Check the help file for common
 problems.

Sorry I cant give any suggestions, just another faithful ubuntu user here.

I had it with hardy, Intrepid and now Jaunty but suspend resumes normally. I did not report it and the bug report is already on it here.

I've recently begun getting this "....Check the help file for common problems." message.
It's a Hardy installation and the computer did suspend. I briefly see a message with "...SRST failed...) in it but cannot find and help file to check.

user.log reports "...Resuming computer
suspend failed..

Same message here as previously reported.

I did briefly see a message that included "...SRST failed...." but I cannot find it in a log file

"Check help file..."

user.log reports "..Resuming computer
                           ... suspend failed...
                               Resuming computer".
It would be nice to see a link in the message that actually leads to some help.

Eleven years later, gnome-power-manager no longer includes this string or anything like it, so I guess this is fixed.
<https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/bionic/+source/gnome-power-manager/+pots/gnome-power-manager/ro/+translate?batch=10&show=all&search=suspend>