As there are detailled descriptions on how to install Ubuntu on an USB stick (aka “pen drive” or “flash drive”) they assume you have a running Ubuntu System.

To install a CD installation image on an USB stick with any Linux distro, just use dd to put the *.img file on the sticks device (i.e. not on a partition).

dd if=/path/to/ubuntu-X.XX.X-Arch.img of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

After this, you can run your favourite *fdisk and add partions to use the remaining space on the stick for other purposes.

For some reason, the hibernated state was ignored on system start on an Ubuntu 11.10 laptop I am maintaining. On this system, the problem was solved by installing uswsusp:

aptitude install uswsusp

Other resources on the web indicate, that on system start, the swap partition might not be identified. It was recommended to identifify the UUID of the swap partition by

blkid

and use this in configuration files to specify the partition. See

• http://freejabber.com/2012/02/07/fixing-ubuntu-hibernate-sleep-to-disk-when-resume-never-works/
• http://chriseiffel.com/everything-linux/step-by-step-how-to-get-hibernate-working-for-linux-ubuntu-11-04-mint-11/

for more details.

Installing cryptsetup (by dependencies, not using it) seemed to break resume on one laptop (it freezed while reuming after heaving read image “successfully”). Running update-initrd throwed some warnings regarding

cryptsetup: WARNING: found more than one resume device candidate:
                     vg_sys1-lv_SWAP0
                     805ec481-cda1-4548-b7b4-327de62ed4fb

While vg_sys1-lv_SWAP0 was the right resume device in terms of lvm, the UUID 805ec481-cda1-4548-b7b4-327de62ed4fb was not known to the system (any more). Some googling¹⁾ showed, that /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume might be involved - in my case, it contained the UUID mentioned by update-initrd.

Create the file /etc/pm/sleep.d/00_xen containing the following lines:

#!/bin/sh

mode="$1"
xendir=/proc/xen

case "$mode" in
  "hibernate") if [ -d "$xendir" ]
               then
                  echo "$0: Obviously running XEN, as $xendir exists"
                  echo "$0: Inhibiting $mode"
                  exit 1
               fi
               ;;
esac