Hi, i'm a newbie.
I've recently ungraded my ubuntu oneiric to the new "Precise pangolin", and it gives me the same problem with suspending and hibernating. I have used this tutorial "http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=11926504" and still not having the desired result (suspend or hibernate my computer).
I got a laptop Gateway NV51B08u, with ubuntu 12.04 32-bit, Kernel Linux 3.2.0-26-generic, GNOME 3.4.1, 2.7GB of "swap" (textual copy of system monitor) and 3GB of RAM
I have also noticed that almost every user of ubuntu (of wich I read) have this trouble with 12.04 and older distributions.
Should I format my entire HDD to begin from zero? Reinstall with 64-bit?

You could reformat your drive and re install however that is not a guarantee that suspend/hibernation is going to work. What you can do is change the settings in the power manager so make it that when you close the lid of your laptop the screen goes blank but doesn't suspend the Operating System.

That is working for me so my system doesn't crash when I close the lid of my laptop.

Good luck to you!

TroN-0074, sorry, I can't use that. I move plenty in my ordinary day, and I need to quickly restart my job. Turning settings to "do nothing" in power management works, but fan keeps moving and in my backpack it gets pretty hot.

For hibernate to ever work the swap partition should be at least the same amount as there is RAM, I.e. 3G. This is because all of the memory is written to disk (specifically swap) which is non-volatile storage when hibernating.

I am not sure if the suspend function would be affected by that or not.

If the tool gparted is installed it might be straight forward to increase the swap partition to 3G if it is a logical volume.

The first half of this article has clear and useful information on swap:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq/

If you decided to edit your swap partition to match or exceed the amount of RAM you have installed and works let me know. I will need to do the same because in my laptop I just have the settings to do nothing when closed the laptops lid.

That has been doing the trick for me but if there is a better solution I would like to try it.

Good luck to you.