[Apple PowerBook G4] gnome-power-manger does not work in karmic ppc

[Jonathan Hudson]

Binary package hint: gnome-power-manager

On Karmic (9.10) , PPC, (G4 15" tibook) gnome-power-manager 2.28.1-0ubuntu1 is completely dis-functional.

* The Icon is always the 'wall plug' regardless of power state;
* The Icon does not not change when power is removed;
* There is no tool-tip on mouse-over;
* Closing the lid does not suspend the machine.

If one takes the Jauunty deb, extracts 'data.tar.gz' and as root, extracts that to /, then it all works again :-)

-jh

[Onkar Shinde (onkarshinde)]

I can confirm all the symptoms on my ibook G4 (powerpc) laptop. Except in my case the panel icon is not shown unless I select 'Always show icon' from preferences and the icon is always of battery regardless of power state.

[Wojtek Kaniewski (wojtekka)]

Short story: sudo modprobe pmu_battery

Long story: This is not an issue with GPM but with an underlying hardware abstraction layer. Previous versions of GPM used HAL for all the low-level work (it supports regular hardware via sysfs and PowerPC Macs via /dev/pmu and /proc/pmu interfaces), whereas current version relies solely on DeviceKit (it only supports sysfs). To make DeviceKit see the battery, pmu_battery kernel module needs to be loaded. Unfortunately either it was never loaded by default or upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 broke it.

Related bug reports in other distros:
- Debian: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=544264
- Fedora: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=502253

[Onkar Shinde (onkarshinde)]

Wojtek,

I loaded pmu_battery module and power management works now. I don't know if it was loaded by default in previous versions of Ubuntu.

[David Tombs (dgtombs)]

Reassigning to kernel as it's a module issue.

[David Tombs (dgtombs)]

Invalidating upstream g-p-m task, issue is not with g-p-m.

[Onkar Shinde (onkarshinde)]

Please find attached udev log. The module pmu_battery is loaded by adding it to /etc/modules.

[Onkar Shinde (onkarshinde)]

Please find attached udev log when pmu_battery module is not loaded.