Black screen or kernel panic after suspend?

Question

I recently switched to elementary os (loki) and I love it so far. However, I am experiencing some problems. I am very new to Linux and find myself not really knowing what i'm doing most of the time when trying to solve these problems myself. The issue that I am having is that after waking up from suspend my computer freezes on a black screen. This happens after closing and opening my laptop. When I enter suspend from the menu in elementary and attempt to wake it up again after that I am greeted with a lot of text, ending in a kernel panic message.

I found two possible solutions for this online. One is to install graphic card drivers. And another to install a different kernel version. Neither of these solutions worked out for me.

I have an AMD Radeon R7 M440 graphics card. The "Additional Drivers" utility does not seem to recognize this showing only: "Unknown: Unknown" and "This device is not working". The driver from amd.com which should work on Ubuntu 16 causes me to not be able too boot at all (black screen after grub). I'm afraid that at this point I am at a dead end as far as the drivers are concerned. I hope that someone has another suggestion.

Another suggestion I found regarding the black screen after suspend was to install a different kernel with the following command:

sudo apt install linux-headers-4.4.0-36 linux-headers-4.4.0-36-generic linux-image-4.4.0-36-generic linux-image-extra-4.4.0-36-generic

However this did not solve it for me. Also when I run:

uname -r

It shows that the kernel version is still 4.4.0-51-generic. I guess I just don't know what I'm doing. I hope someone can help!

Answer 1

I solved my problem by updating the kernel to the latest version (4.6.5) following these instructions:

To Install and upgrade Linux Kernel 4.6.5 (Stable) on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus, Ubuntu 15.10 wily werewolf, Ubuntu 15.04 vivid Vervet, ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr (LTS), Linux Mint 17.1, Linux Mint 17.2, Linux Mint 17.3 and other Ubuntu derivative systems, open a new Terminal window and bash (get it?) in the following commands:

wget http://in4serv.com.br/backup/kernel-4.6.5

sudo chmod +x kernel-4.6.5

./kernel-4.6.5

After Download and installation kernel 4.6.5 is finished, you must reboot your ubuntu system to change boot latest kernel :

sudo reboot

Booting, and check your ubuntu kernel version

uname -a

Source: Update to Linux Kernel 4.6.5 (stable) on Linux Mint / Elementary OS / Ubuntu Derivatives