Laptop cover switch in FC5

Michael H. Warfield mhw at WittsEnd.com
Tue Apr 11 18:34:42 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-04-11 at 13:14 -0400, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> 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.

	Will do.  Thanks for pointing that out.

> > 	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.

	Perfect...  I've already readded the battery monitor icon.  Now I just
have to figure out how to get rid of gnome-power-manager.  It's in the
notification applet and doesn't have a "delete".  So, I guess that will
have to be done from the session configuration.

> 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.

	Well...  I'm going to try hooking the radeontool commands into some
acpi event handlers like before to control the screens independently.
I've already checked it out and "radeontool light off" turns off the
cover backlight and leaves the external monitor alone.

> > 	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...

	Looks like I can get it all back the way I want it.  Thanks to everyone
for the pointers and suggestions.  Very useful.

> >
> > 	Mike
> >
> 
> -- 
>  		Matthew Saltzman
> 
> Clemson University Math Sciences
> mjs AT clemson DOT edu
> http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs

	Regards,
	Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
   /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
   NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!

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