When I installed my new laptop, I decided to switch from sleepd to GNOME Power Manager (GPM). The rationale behind this decision was to get screen dimming for free while keeping other features because GPM uses UPower which uses pm-suspend and pm-powersave under the hood. This means that it is easy to execute scripts on suspend or when the AC is unplugged by putting them in /etc/pm.

I don’t use a full GNOME desktop. My desktop is running FVWM which is just a window manager. However, I already use some parts of the GNOME environment:

• GDM as a display manager because it is the only one that is able to handle ConsoleKit correctly. This means that GDM is able to register your session to ConsoleKit and make it active. Without that, you won’t be considered as the user sitting in front of the screen and DBus won’t allow you to interact with most of your hardware unless you add yourself to a lot of groups. ConsoleKit enables the at_console property used by most policies.

• Network Manager to handle both wired and wireless connections. Connecting to some random AP using only command line tools is rather cumbersome (assume that the AP is using WPA). Connecting to a broadband network with a 3G dongle is even more cumbersome.

• GNOME bluetooth applet because interacting with BlueZ bluetooth stack is now done with DBus only and the command line tools have been removed. Therefore, you need to write your own tools or use this small applet that do most of the work for you.

What’s working#

It happens that most of the features just do not work. However, suspend when closing the lid works fine. The icon in the systray works fine too (but there is a small bug). The screen dimming feature on idle also works (but there are annoying bugs with it). The visual feedback when pressing brightness keys works too.

What’s not working#

It seems that I am not the only one to have problem with GPM: there are currently 115 bugs opened in the Debian BTS. If you want to get some debug output from gnome-power-manager, run it with --verbose flag. --debug flag does nothing (and supersedes --verbose).

Nothing happens when pressing the power button#

I have configured GPM to ask me what to do when I press the power button. But when I press the button, nothing happens. Looking at the source, here is the snippet of code that is executed:

if (policy == GPM_ACTION_POLICY_INTERACTIVE) {
    GpmSession *session;
    egg_debug ("logout, reason: %s", reason);
    session = gpm_session_new ();
    gpm_session_logout (session);
    g_object_unref (session);
}

In fact, this is not GPM that will ask you the question, but GNOME session manager because GPM triggers logout. If you don’t run a full GNOME session, nothing will happen.

My workaround is just to set the action to “Suspend.”

Does not sleep when idle#

GPM is configured to go to sleep after 2 hours on AC or 30 minutes on battery. This does not work for me because idle detection is delegated to external programs. There are four variables used by GPM to determine if we are idle:

• session_idle which is the idle hint from ConsoleKit
• idle_inhibited which is set when another program asks to disable idle detection (a video player which does not want the screen to be dimmed)
• suspend_inhibited which means a program do not want we going to sleep (a music player for example)
• x_idle which tells if X is idle or not (someone is moving the mouse or typing on the keyboard)

To allow GPM to suspend when we are idle, x_idle and session_idle must be true while suspend_inhibited and idle_inhibited must be false. For screen dimming purpose, you just need to have x_idle set to true and idle_inhibited set to false.

Currently, only GNOME Screensaver seems to tell ConsoleKit if the session is idle or not. XScreenSaver does not contain anything about this. I am using xautolock with xlock and I am pretty sure they won’t tell GPM if I am idle.

You can use dbus-send to circumvent this problem:

$ dbus-send --system --dest=org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit \
>   --type=method_call --print-reply --reply-timeout=2000 \
>   /org/freedesktop/ConsoleKit/Manager \
>   org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager.GetCurrentSession
method return sender=:1.6 -> dest=:1.106 reply_serial=2
   object path "/org/freedesktop/ConsoleKit/Session1"
$ dbus-send --system --dest=org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit \
>   --type=method_call --print-reply --reply-timeout=2000 \
>   /org/freedesktop/ConsoleKit/Session1 \
>   org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Session.SetIdleHint boolean:true
method return sender=:1.6 -> dest=:1.108 reply_serial=2

While I understand what is the rationale behind these choices (no code duplicate and allowing external programs to hinder power management), it lacks some fallback in case you don’t use GNOME Screensaver (which is the key component here).

I first though this was bug #594706 but this is not the case. I have opened (and closed) bug #628755.

Brightness is not restored to the previous value after idle#

When GPM undims the screen, it does not restore the previous value. It seems to be bug #617310 which is marked as fixed in upstream. I did not investigate it.

Wrong number of batteries reported#

I only have one battery but after one suspend/resume cycle, GPM thinks I have two. Maybe this is a bug of UPower. Maybe this is bug #606434. I did not investigate it. Maybe there is a happy interaction with bug #456280.

Inability to set configure actions when the UPS runs out of battery#

This is bug #390602. In addition to laptop batteries, UPower also supports UPS. In this case, GPM displays a special icon to tell if the UPS is fully charged. However, there is no possibility to execute special actions when the UPS is unplugged, like hibernate after 10 minutes or something like this. This seems to be a problem with the interface because looking with gconftool-2, we can spot variables like low_ups or critical_ups which allows us to set actions when the UPS is almost out of battery.

Moreover, the UPS icon only displays after one suspend/resume cycle but I am too lazy to report and debug this issue. Since, the icon disappear if I restart GPM, I am confident that the bug is in GPM.

Conclusion#

The conclusion is that GPM is not really that buggy but it really needs to be run in a full-blown GNOME desktop. The main problem is not really GPM. New technologies like UPower and ConsoleKit get pushed by freedesktop.org initiative, they get implemented by GNOME (and, I suppose, KDE) because they have tons of people following the appropriate mailing lists and any alternative just gets crushed by all these unpublicized changes.

1. Use xfce4-power-manager. It handles brightness control in a better way and don’t need an external program to tell when the current session is idle. It still needs a session manager to ask what to do when using the power button. The drawback to this solution is that you start to pull another desktop environment into your environment. You had some parts of GNOME and now you have some parts of XFCE. This solution was proposed by Sylvain Collilieux.

2. Use gnome-session, gnome-screensaver and keep gnome-power-manager. As pointed by Julien Valroff, gnome-screensaver needs gnome-session to detect idleness. However, gnome-session starts a whole GNOME desktop. Again, there are two solutions. The first one is to replace gnome-session by something lighter implementing the bare minimum to make gnome-screensaver happy. Another suggestion is to configure gnome-session to start your favorite environment.

I start mine from ~/.xsession and here is what I have added at the top of it:

# If not done, restart ourself with gnome-session
if [ -z "$SESSION_MANAGER" ]; then
    [ -d ~/.config/autostart ] || mkdir ~/.config/autostart
    rm -f ~/.config/autostart/*
    cat <<EOF > ~/.config/autostart/xsession.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Xsession
Comment=Start .xsession
Exec=$(readlink -f $0)
Type=Application
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
EOF
    exec gnome-session --autostart=$HOME/.config/autostart
fi
# Otherwise, keep starting stuff
# […]
exec fvwm-crystal