On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, Michael H. Warfield wrote:
But that seems to be just the first bug. Running that one down, I found the explanation to a much worse bug. One of the things I commonly have been doing daily is to, at my desk, close the lid on my running laptop, unplug it from the network and external monitor, walk into a conference room from my desk for a daily conference call, and then open the lid and plug in a network cable there. Then I run on battery for the hour of the call and reverse the process back to my desk. I noticed that when I do that under FC5, the laptop is dead as a doornail. I have to do a hard power off to recover it. Ever since upgrading to FC5, I have to walk around with the laptop cover open if it's powered on. That sucks. So tracking this down, I came to discover that what is happening seems to be gnome-power-(mis)manager getting seriously dicked up or getting the machine state dicked up. When I close the cover under AC power, gnome-power-manager blanks the screenS. When I unplug the AC power, gnome-power-manager goes to suspend to ram. When I open the cover, the laptop comes out of suspend (power indicator indicates running) but never reactivates the screen and doesn't respond to the keyboard. I can manually suspend to ram and then close the cover and open the cover and it recovers just fine. I guess by manually suspending it, I never give gnome-power-manager the opportunity to commit random acts of terrorism when the lid and power state change ina way it wasn't prepared to handle. It just seems to be this thing with gnome-power-manager blanking the screen, then suspending to ram, that leaves the machine in a state that can not recover when the lid opens back up.
There are already a number of bugs against gnome-power-manager describing similar symptoms. Add your comments to appropriate ones.
Setting the "running on battery" setting to "blanks screen" instead of "suspend" works around THAT problem very nicely. I didn't want it suspending when I close the lid anyways (which is usually just to reach for something) and when I want it suspended or hibernated, I can suspend or hibernate it from the panel, just fine. So, that's progress at least. I can close the cover when I walk between my desk and my conference room once again. I liked it MUCH better when the battery applet was just a battery applet and didn't try to do things I really didn't want it doing. I'd like to just KILL the gnome-power-manager, but I want the battery applet. Sigh...
You can have the battery applet. The battery monitor in add-to-panel is the same old one. What I don't know is what happens when you delete the power-manager applet.
And I still haven't figured out how to make IBM buttons work with gnome-power-manager yet. Suspend-resume works, but I'm not sure what has to happen to get screen blanking or external monitor switching from the keyboard.
Guess I'm off to file a couple of bugzilla reports on gnome-power-manager... Two bugs plus lost functionality. Par for da course...
It's not clear yet that the functionality has been lost, but if not then the way to achieve it has changed. Growing pains...
Mike
-- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
