When I wanted to suspend my notebook today the hibernate button was gone from the menu. Running the /etc/acpi/hibernate.sh shell script as root still worked, but there was no way to get that silly button back.

My first idea was some kind of configuration trouble, suddenly appearing for no reason (I never trusted gconf completely anyway). But obviously, that wasn't the problem:

$ gconftool-2 -g /apps/gnome-power-manager/general/can_hibernate
true
$

After some time reading shell scripts I found the problem tough. A while ago I added more RAM to my notebook and also had to configure a swap file because my swap partition was too small. Things worked fine for a while, but then an upgrade of package powermanagement-interface (0.3.16) came along with the following change:

powermanagement-interface (0.3.16) gutsy; urgency=low

  * pmi.acpi: Disable suspend and hibernate if /host is mounted via fuse;
    disable hibernate if a swap file is active.

I cannot say if there could possibly be problems with swap files, but this change leaves me with two ugly options:

1. Hack the /usr/sbin/pmi shell script to disable the check (gah!)
2. Render the swap file obsolete by re-partitioning my disk

Unless someone comes up with a better idea, I'm leaning towards option 2 ...