If you’re experiencing issues with Ubuntu and it’s forks going to a black screen with a blinking cursor instead of sleeping or hibernating, the following fix may help you.

I experienced the issue with Jolicloud on my Dell Mini 9. Both shutting the lid, and clicking the sleep option in the quit menu went to the blinking cursor screen. Making this edit fixed the issue in both places.

Edit /etc/default/acpi-support with your favorite editor

Change the options SUSPEND_METHODS by adding hibernate to the front of the list. So the line should read as follows:

SUSPEND_METHODS=”hibernate dbus-pm dbus-hal pm-utils”

Save the file and give your computer a restart. Your sleep command should now work as expected.