Map Suspend & Hibernate to shortcut keys

One of the issues I recently encountered when upgrading to Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) Update Pack 8 (UP8) is the loss of functionality of the suspend and hibernate keys.  At first I was under the impression that it was just an issue on my Thinkpad, but I discovered the issue existed on all the system that I upgraded.  It's a known issue and was identified in this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/1276678

There might be other workarounds to resolving the issue, but I took this as a good opportunity to finally mapping out a new suspend/hibernate key combination that I could use across all my systems.  The FN-F4 for suspend and FN-F12 may be universal on all Thinkpads, but my Vaio and Ultrabook use different suspend and hibernate keys, thus my finger-memory sometimes slips up.

To tackle both problems, I decided create a common shortcut key for each function across all my systems.  Because the FN keys tend to be tied to hardware routines, I settled on SHIFT+F4 for suspend and SHIFT+F12 for hibernate.

The first step to tackle was writing a suspend and hibernate script that could be invoked by my user ID without having to provide a sudo password.

I added the following two lines to my /etc/sudoers file.

durdle t420-ssd = (root) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/pm-hibernate
durdle t420-ssd = (root) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/pm-suspend

Substitute durdle with your user ID, and t420-ssd with our hostname.

You may find that you need to change the file  /etc/sudoers  to have write permissions before you can edit it (doing a  chmod 740 /etc/sudoers before updating the file and a chmod 440 /etc/sudoers after updating the file, will do the trick).

Next, I decided to create shortcut scripts in my ~/bin/ folder.  This will allow me to quickly suspend and hibernate from the command line and allow me to easily tie the two routines to the Autokey program.

My two scripts resemble as follows:

~/bin/hibernate.sh 

sudo /usr/sbin/pm-hibernate

~/bin/suspend.sh 

sudo /usr/sbin/pm-suspend

If you can't use the pm-hibernate or pm-suspend programs to hibernate or suspend, you can substitute your equivalent calls.  Or if you need to add wrappers around them, these shell scripts are the place to put them.  Previous to kernel 3.13, my Vaio need some additional system calls before calling pm-hibernate, in order to ensure a proper hibernate.  I place those calls in my hibernate.sh.

I use a program called Autokey for various shortcuts and keyboard macros.  If you don't normally use Autokey, you will need to ensure that it starts up on boot up.  You can do this by calling it in your "Startup Applications" list.

The program is fairly self explanatory.  You will create two new scripts, enter the following, substituting your username in, and then assigning the Hotkey <shift>+<f4> and Hotke <shift>+<f12>:

for suspend:

import os

os.system('/home/durdle/bin/suspend.sh')

for hibernate:

import os

os.system('/home/durdle/bin/hibernate.sh')

That's it!  Now when you press SHIFT+F4, your system should suspend and when you press SHIFT+F12, your system should hibernate, all without entering a password.