How to make hibernate/sleep work on laptops where default setup isn't working?

I have an Asus r1f laptop. For some reason, hibernate/sleep isn't working properly at all. Are there any other packages I can use or tweaks I can implement to get this working?

I've googled around and this appears to be an issue with some laptops and their need for proprietary drivers. Is this true? Is there anything I can do?

You can try to put the name of your proprietary module (nvidia or fglrx (for ATI) are most likely) in the quotes in MODULE="" in the /etc/default/acpi-support file and reboot.

sudo nano /etc/default/acpi-support

This'll make that module unload before suspend and reload after suspend. It sometimes works, but it's also possible that you have just plain buggy drivers somewhere and need to file a kernel bug.

EDIT: It's also very possible that you've just plain found a bug. If you think that's the case, please file it: ubuntu-bug linux

You should try µswsusp. From the Wikipedia article:

uswsusp (userspace software suspend) is a suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk implementation for the Linux operating system, compatible with kernels 2.6.17 and onwards. It supports both s2ram ("standby") and s2disk ("hibernate"), as well as a mode called "s2both", which saves state to disk and RAM. S2both is intended for use in low-battery situations where restoring from ram is desired but can't be relied on as the battery may fail causing a restore from disk to be necessary.

The package is available in the Ubuntu Software Center.