gnome-power-manager interface confusing and undocumented

[DaveAbrahams]

The "Gnome Power Manager Manual" that you reach through the "Help" button is totally useless; all it shows are pictures of the UI with no explanation. In fact, the pictures don't even match the actual UI (e.g. they contain a "Computer Speed Policy" menu that doesn't appear in the actual g-p-m UI).

The actual UI is inadequately self-documenting, but then the documentation should help in such cases. Here are some open questions that are neither documentede nor self-evident from the UI:
I know there are at least several levels of display sleep (available through xset) and the interface doesn't tell me which one(s) I'm going to get. Is this the full power saving I really want, or some intermediate state, or what? Also, the "Set display brightness to:" sliders have an unclear effect. Just when does that brightness setting take place? Is it part of g-p-m's notion of "display sleep?" What does "Dim display when idle" do exactly? How long does the computer have to be idle before dimming begins? Is the display supposed to undim when I start using the computer again?

Please see https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/308815

[DaveAbrahams (boostpro)]

@Dean, could you please explain why this isn't a valid bug against Ubuntu Documentation?

Thanks

[Matthew East (mdke)]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 1:18 AM, DaveAbrahams <email address hidden> wrote:
> @Dean, could you please explain why this isn't a valid bug against
> Ubuntu Documentation?

Dave - the gnome-power-manager manual is provided in the
gnome-power-manager package, it comes from the authors of that
program, rather than the Ubuntu documentation team. Dean has just
moved the bug to the correct place.

--
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF

[Scott Howard (showard314)]

Thanks for the report, as Matthew pointed out, GPMS's help comes from the source. Has the help improved or is it still a problem?

If it is still a problem, the best way to get it fixed is to post a bug at;
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=gnome-power-manager
and then post a link to that bug report here.

If you have the time and energy, you can help by working on improving the help files for the GPM project.

[Victor Vargas (kamus)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

We are closing this bug report as it lacks the information, described in the previous comments, we need to investigate the problem further. However, please reopen it if you can give us the missing information and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future.