Ubuntu 13.10 suspend crashes KDE / black screen on wake

Question

Setup

I have a fresh install of Ubuntu 13.10, with KDE (installed via Ubuntu server disk and sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop).

Problem

Whenever I suspend the computer while in KDE (either via sudo pm-suspend in Konsole or via KDE's interface), I get a black screen on wake up.

Attempted workarounds / fixes

If I press ctrl+alt+f1 and then ctrl+alt+f7 and I'm patient (20-30 seconds), I sometimes get back into KDE where I was, or sometimes I get back to the login screen (KDE crashed). But even when I get back into KDE, I get a notification saying that the special effects had to restart due to a graphics problem and then the fonts in all applications are... garbled.

If I suspend from another tty with sudo pm-suspend (while KDE is running on tty7), it works flawlessly (resumes instantly - no need to wait 20-30 seconds, KDE does not crash and does not cause font garble).

I tried changing graphics drivers and I get the same thing (I have Nvidia NVS300 and I'm using the latest proprietary drivers in Ubuntu repos). Also tried this Ubuntu freezes/crash after wake when upgraded to 13.10 and it didn't work.

This problem did not occur on the same system, when I was running Kubuntu 12.04.

Trying to find the problem...

Dmesg doesn't show any errors. I don't even know where to look further for any errors (any KDE logs?). Any help appreciated.

Solution 1

I found this workaround. I made a script that switches to console before suspend and switches back after resume.

I put attached script into dir /etc/pm/sleep.d. I gave it the name fix-black-screen and made it executable (sudo chmod +x /etc/pm/sleep.d/fix-black-screen).

#!/bin/bash

case $1 in
suspend)
    # Suspending to RAM.
    chvt 1
    sleep 1
;;
resume)
    # Resume from suspend.
    sleep 1
    chvt 7
;;
esac

Original fix found here.

Solution 2

I had similar problems to yours.

pm-suspend --store-quirks-as-lkw

Fixed my problems.

I only had to do it once, and suspending after that was working fine.

Give it a try.

Comments

[virtualxtc]

I'm having similar problems with hibernate but not suspend. Do you also see this in hibernate?

[virtualxtc]

Also, have you verified hibernate is active in your BIOS? I never remember the BIOS terminologies my self, so you might find this page helpful: gsmblog.com/post/…

[Vlad A. Ionescu]

@virtualxtc When I try to hibernate, the screen goes black but it doesn't go into hibernate (power lights don't go off and fans still spinning). But computer remains unresponsive. Looking in /var/log/pm-suspend.log (after I power cycle the computer), I see that it reports that it thaws back a few seconds after the hibernate command.

[Vlad A. Ionescu]

@virtualxtc My BIOS doesn't have a setting for enabling / disabling standby modes.

[virtualxtc]

hum, if the solutions below don't suit your likeing you might want to play with the grub2 powermangement boot flags (acpi=on, acpi=off) more here: help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions

[Vlad A. Ionescu]

Thanks for the answer, Pedro. It didn't help unfortunately. I get the same behaviour as before.