I've just about given up on trying to get hibernation working correcly. I'm using Gentoo (tuxonice-sources kernel).

What I want is to be able to press the power button and have the system run the hibernate script. I have acpid installed, and if the system has been been rebooted (not resumed from hiberation) it will correctly detect the power button event and run the hibernation script. After I boot the computer back up, it loads the image, BUT, acpid seems to be broken at this point, and the power button is no longer detected. I've tried restarting acpid, but when I do this it says "/proc/acpi/event" is busy. Is there an alternative to acpid that I'm not aware of that DOESN'T use /proc/acpi/event?

I'm using fluxbox, and would rather not have to install gnome or kde just to get the power button working correctly.

Thanks for anyone who can help...

when you apend your grub or lilo you need to tell acpid where to resume from.
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux"
root=/dev/hda1 #my swap is on /dev/hda3
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="acpi=on resume=/dev/hda3 splash=silent" <--- this
vga=788............tells it to use /dev/hda3 as a swap file when coming out of hibernation. it also lets it use that to dump the cashe there if need. and this way everything can power down except the ram and swap on hda3 hope this helped

Thanks for the suggestion, Drakeo.

The "acpi=on" and "resume=" was actually missing from my grub.conf, but adding it doesn't seem to make a difference.

If it helps, I ran netstat both before hibernation (but after a fresh reboot), and after resuming from hibernation.

The first time I ran it (before hibernation), there was one entry for /var/run/acpid.socket (I-node 7026).

I ran "/etc/init.d/acpid stop", and netstat showed that the /var/run/acpid.socket entry was gone. I restarted acpid, and the connection was back... I don't know much about this, but it seems normal so far.

Next I hibernated the machine and powered it back on. After it resumed, I ran netstat again. This time there were two entries for /var/run/acpid.socket: one with 7026 I-node, and another with "0" for the I-node. Obviously not normal.

I tried stopping the acpid service the same way as before, but this time it gave me an error, and netstat showed me the same two entries. I did a killall acpid, and netstat still shows the same two entries. In fact, killall doesn't seem to kill acpid at all.

What's going on here?

I had this problem with a hp and hardy heron ubuntu 8.04. the it would not hibernate but I looked at the scripts and for some reason it never would come up from the power button drove me crazy. I set it up to hibernate close the lid then use the power button to start up. for some reason it creates another socket and to be honest I gave up and started using suspend .it worked so I used suspend to close the lid then power button to start. this was a soft boot. so I left my setting for hibernation only if my battery got low.
not sure if this helps but linux is not great at running bios.
I had a toshiba laptop that I had to modprobe toshiba before it worked. it seemed it loaded a generic module for acpid