critical popup disappears too fast to read

[Paul Sladen]

Gnome-power-manager reminds the user when they are at a critical battery level, informing them of what is likely to happen next (eg. sudden power-off) if they don't act.

This message has been expanded in helpfulness and is now 3 lines long. This is impossible to read completely in the 5 seconds that the popup remains on the screen.

 (a) The length of the popup display should be increased;
 (b) The message should be shortened and tersified;
 (c) Preferably both

The message is displayed in:

    http://www.paul.sladen.org/ubuntu/bugs/g-p-m-critical-action-too-short.png

and is:

  The battery is below the critical level and this computer will *power-off* when the battery becomes completely empty.

would this be any better:

  Battery is empty. Computer will *power-off* shortly.

[Richard Hughes (richard-hughes)]

What version libnotify? libnotify 0.2.x was know to have a bug where the timeout was fixed at a small value, due to a bug in the C++.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

  $ dpkg -l | awk '/^ii.*libnotify/{print $3}'
  0.3.2-0ubuntu3

I haven't look into it, but I presumed the suggested period of time is set by the calling application as some dialogues appear to stay for 60seconds, some for 30seconds... et al.

[Richard Hughes (richard-hughes)]

How about 30 seconds? Could you do a patch against CVS please, many thanks.

[Richard Hughes (richard-hughes)]

This is now in CVS:

2006-03-03 Richard Hughes <email address hidden>
 * src/gpm-tray-icon.c (libnotify_event, gpm_tray_icon_notify): set the timeout parameter unit to be seconds, so we can still work with the old (ms) and new (s) libnotify versions.
 * src/gpm-manager.c: convert all the users of gpm_tray_icon_notify to send timeouts in seconds, and also define the defines GPM_NOTIFY_TIMEOUT_LONG (20 seconds) and GPM_NOTIFY_TIMEOUT_SHORT (5 seconds) so we can change the values to a sensible default in one place only.

Richard.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

It seems likely that the fix in CVS is now in Dapper, please confirm

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

marking as fixed, new version should have that change. Feel free to reopen if that's not the case