Disregarding GUI, you can always put your Linux system to sleep from command line. Here is a Fedora suspend procedure step by step.
This is especially useful if your GUI breaks for some reason and becomes unresponsive to suspend command, or you wish to suspend your system remotely. Suspend, also known as sleep, is a state where your system’s current running state is saved directly to RAM and remains dormant until awaken by some sort of wake up event, such as pressing power button, opening laptop lid or mouse move.
Since RAM is a volatile memory and requires electrical power to hold data your system while in suspended state continues to use electrical power. In this tutorial, you’ll see how to make your Fedora Linux system sleep, via both command line and GUI. These instructions should also transfer to other RHEL based distros, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, itself.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to sleep a Fedora Linux system
| Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
|---|---|
| System | Fedora Linux |
| Software | N/A |
| Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
| Conventions | # – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
How to make sleep or suspend Fedora
To suspend/sleep your Redhat/Fedora system you can enter the following linux command:
$ systemctl suspend
Depending on the system settings you may be required to execute the above command as a root user.
Note that the system will not go into a suspended state while users are logged in. You can overwrite the suspend inhibitors with -i option.
$ systemctl suspend -i
Just to be complete, the suspend state is not to be mistaken with hibernate state. In hibernate state the system running state is save to hard drive thus not requiring electrical power to maintain hibernation.
The sleep mode can also be accessed from within GUI, under the power options, as seen in this screenshot:
Note that other actions can also trigger sleep mode, such as closing a laptop lid, pressing the power button (not holding it), and leaving the computer idle for a certain amount of time.
Closing Thoughts
In this tutorial, we saw how to sleep/suspend a Fedora Linux system via command line and GUI. Although this is a feature more commonly associated with the GUI, Linux always gives us a way to control our system from the command line. Now, you will always be able to force your system to sleep, even if you are logged into the system from a remote SSH session.