MacBook Pro 5,2 display won't return from sleep

Support & Help Requests
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#1

Hi - I'm new to Linux (except for one install 20 years ago) but have some Unix under-the-hood experience.

Yesterday I installed MATE 18.04 from USB stick onto an ancient MacBook Pro 5,2 (2009 or so) as dual-boot. Install went fine, and I quickly solved a couple issues (like a missing network driver).

Today I've discovered that when I suspend MATE (either with the Suspend menu command, or by closing the laptop), when I try to wake it up again, the keyboard backlight will come on (suggesting that MATE has reawakened), but the display will never re-illuminate, making the computer unusable without a hard reboot. (I assume if I connect to an external display I'll be able to power down normally, but I don't have the display adapter for that handy.)

Is this a known issue, and is there a quick fix?

20.04 Unable to resume from suspend 2009 Apple MBP
#2

Additional info:

  • Computer does indeed seem to be awaking back into MATE (some blind mouse clicks are generating MATE feedback sounds)

  • Unfortunately plugging the reawakened computer into an external display doesn't work either. Although the external display does sense something has plugged into it (its status light indicates it), after a minute the display gives up with a NO SIGNAL message.

#3

Hi richmintz, welcome,

If you're looking for a "quick fix", try this. You don't loose anything. Here is showing other solutions too. I'm not sure at all, but googling it seems a common graphics card driver problem.

Cheers!

1 Like
#4

Problem solved, thank you. The simple solution didn't help, but that page linked to this page which led me to this other page.

I think the problem is that I had an incomplete install of a NVIDIA graphics driver (or possibly, when installing Steam, had installed a driver that was too recent for my hardware to support).

I solved it with
sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-* -y
sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
sudo service lightdm restart

and ended up with NVIDIA 3.40, and the problem went away. Thanks for steering me the right way!

1 Like