Laptop cover switch in FC5

Matthew Saltzman mjs at ces.clemson.edu
Tue Apr 11 17:14:50 UTC 2006


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




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