"When battery power critical" does not allow 'suspend' action

[Paul Sladen]

Gnome-power-manager provides a way for the user to configure what action they wish to be taken when the battery power of the laptop reached a (selectable) "critical" level.

The current options are:

 (a) Do nothing.
 (b) Hibernate.
 (c) Shutdown.

This should also provide a 'Suspend' option to allow the laptop to be placed in S3. The user should then be free to wake the laptop and use the remaining 5% (or other) amount of power remaining.

This is not anymore dangerous than the 'Do nothing' option that is currently provided. I have successfully used my laptop in this mode for multiple years; because of the lower power required to maintain just the RAM state of the laptop it is possible for the computer to remain in this state for several hours before the computer 'dies in its sleep'.

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

but *if* it dies in its dreams for which the duration may vary from battery to battery, all documents you had open when you ran out of battery are lost ...

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

If I forget about the laptop and so effectively Do Nothing, I loose everything. The advantages are:

  (a) By having the laptop suspend I *really* notice that I need to do something about the battery; even if I have the volume muted and didn't hear the audible warning.
  (b) Because of massively different rates of power usage, I may not have enough power to hibernate, but I *do* have enough power to keep the RAM alive for 5-10minutes to sort out fetching my power-cord and foreign AC adaptor, moving the sofa and forcing a europlug into the UK socket with a penknife.
  (c) I can power the laptop back on and use the remaining 20 minutes that my Thinkpad R31 gives me between 0% and the point where the battery *really* runs out. The laptop will not power-on below 5% battery, but will quite happily run if suspended.
  (d) Doing the suspend at least syncs the filesystem (and prevents any further writes) before allowing the machine to die...

[Richard Hughes (richard-hughes)]

Discussed upstream : http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330267. Please add comments to this bug.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Under discussion upstream.

[Daniel Silverstone (dsilvers)]

Fixed in 2.13.91-0ubuntu1