gnome-power-manager sets all DPMS timeouts to 0

[Tony Houghton]

Binary package hint: gnome-power-manager

I've recently installed Hardy on both my laptop (x86, Intel graphics) and my desktop PC (amd64, NVidia graphics) and gnome-power-manager is broken on both of them. It ignores its settings and sets all the DPMS timeouts to 0, disabling power saving. I usually use a ROX session instead of GNOME so I thought the problem might be due to it missing some component in GNOME, but if I run xset q in GNOME it also shows that the timeouts are all 0.

My current gnome-power-manager version is 2.22.1-1ubuntu4.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Intrepid Ibex. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Tony Houghton (h-realh)]

I've discovered that this behaviour is deliberate and gnome-power-manager (gpm) relies on gnome-screensaver (gss) to implement the blanking and DPMS instead of X. It behaves correctly when gnome-screensaver is running.

It would have been nice to be able to use gpm without gss, because for most people there's no point in a screensaver that does anything except save power. However, gss does provide a way of suspending blanking for video players etc:- gnome-screensaver-command --poke - which is better than temporarily changing the X settings, so it's got its uses after all.

Although I think it might be preferable for gpm to handle DPMS for gss instead of the other way round, I don't mind if this bug is closed without anything being changed.

[Philip Muškovac (yofel)]

Hi, you reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Thanks in advance.

[Tony Houghton (h-realh)]

Feel free to close it. As there is a workaround (running gnome-screensaver) it isn't really a problem, and even if I still want it changed it would be better to ask upstream.

[Philip Muškovac (yofel)]

Then we'll be closing this bug now. Thank you for your time and please report any other bugs you may find!