Turning off Resume from Hibernation in Ubuntu 10.04

I use dm-crypt on all my machines now, including laptops, to provide full-disk encryption. I also use it to encrypt swap partitions with a randomly-generated key. All of these are features that Ubuntu 10.04 provides out-of-the-box, at least when you use the alternate CD to install.

I also recently installed µswsusp on one of my laptops, a userspace hibernation facility. I didn’t really connect the dots until one day I left the laptop running, coming back to find it hibernated. When I tried to resume, the boot process hung as the kernel complained it couldn’t resume the image. After a facepalm moment (of course this wouldn’t work - the encryption key isn’t constant across boots -  you have to use a constant key if you want to get hibernation working), I eventually figured out how to book the machine: use the noresume parameter when booting the kernel.

The only thing blocking me from using this now was getting the Grub menu to come up so I could change that kernel boot line. It appears that in the switch to Grub 2, the key to do this changed to the Shift key, from the Esc key as it had been in Grub 1. After I managed to bring up the menu, I could boot the kernel without resuming the image. I then deinstalled µswsusp.