GNOME Power Manager - 0.0.3

GNOME Power Manager is being designed for inclusion with GNOME 2.12 or even 2.14 - i.e. some distance away. I'm sure in a year or more time nobody will be using HAL 0.4.X or DBUS 0.30 - the distros just need time to catch up. Fedora Core Rawhide is the only distro (I know...) that has the current CVS packages of dbus and HAL to satisfy dependencies.
If you are not using something insanely up to date, e.g. gentoo on CVS, or FC-Rawhide then it won't even build.

The reason for the extreme CVS nature of the dependencies, is that DBUS 0.30 does not support the glib bindings that the utopia people want to use, and what will be used in the future versions of GNOME. HAL 0.40 has no idea about any ACPI/APM/PMU devices as the support just wasn’t added then; further more, the current CVS HAL does not support device actions yet, e.g. “Hibernate” – yet. This is all to come, and is slowly being put together piece by piece in a logical and ordered fashion. GPM is not a bit of software that edits /etc/acpid.conf and writes some magic values, it is a session daemon that uses HAL for all properties and actions to maintain a high level approach to power management. The idea is by utilising HAL, we can write the support for say ACPI once, and then use different front-ends/configuration/settings without re-writing the support all over again.

As I mentioned above, HAL 0.4 does not support power-management devices, and so the preference dialogue (I’m surprised you got it to compile…) wouldn’t have shown any options, by design. If you haven’t got the hardware (i.e. it wasn’t detected) then the options to configure it are hidden.

The principle reason for releasing early is to get feedback on the initial design and UI, which people have been very helpful with. I’ve already massively redesigned the UI to be more in line with the GNOME HIG, and the gpm backend daemon is currently being overhauled with the new functionality.

Sorry for the long post, but I hope it clears up your frustrations and any questions. Please be sure to email me with any more comments or suggestions. Thanks, Richard.

Thank you very much for reply. Just one clarification:

As I mentioned above, HAL 0.4 does not support power-management devices, and so the preference dialogue (I’m surprised you got it to compile…)

To compile GPM I have upgraded to DBUS-0.33 and HAL to 0.5.0. GPM worked, but rest of my desktop broke. So after looking at GPM, I downgraded to previous versions of both DBUS and HAL.
I'm impressed that you apparently have recent version and simultanously you have working GNOME desktop (gnome-vfs part mainly), as there are no released version of GNOME components with support to newer DBUS and HAL API. I think I saw Luis Villa's patch for gfloppy, but not for other GNOME Desktop elements.

As for acpid: acpid intercepted power button event at the same time as hald. GPM maybe reacted to this event, but acpid was faster in running shutdown -h now ;)

I will certainly mail you when I'll have further question. Cheers:)

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:wq

Gotcha. I use Fedora Core Rawhide which seems to be very up to date with DBUS and HAL. I guess the fedora guys patch enough to have a working desktop! acpid needs to be disabled for gnome-power-manager (in the future) - the same as pmud and any other daemon for powermanagement - HAL will take care of it all with g-p-m (or KDE equiv) handling the configuration.

Please join the mailing list (https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gnome-power-devel), and it'll keep you up to date with the UI and backend changes. Thanks, Richard.

In the future, you would install gnome-power, and then go to Preferences, Power Manager, click on the Buttons tab and select the action "Suspend" for the Lid event.

I say in the future (you can do all that now...) because we are waiting for HAL to have "methods" added, so you could do a DBUS ../Computer:Shutdown or ../{disk}:unmount which will give GNOME Power Manager a simple way to perform platform neutral power management events.

See here for an example.

I wanted to keep all the "power" options together, ala Windows XP and OSX. By default everything should "Just Work" and you would only have to change something if you wanted the power management to do something different. Point taken tho.

gconf is the standard GNOME configuration system. Using anything else is not an ideal solution.

At the moment you are right, outside of a session the manager would not be loaded. Myself and David Zeuthen have got an idea where we could use system level (as opposed to session level) gconf for the policy, and keep the session specific options session only. Unfortunatly this requires us to wait for system gconf to be included in distos - but we can work on g-p-m until then as session level and switch to system when the time is right - or use Elektra if that is deemed more suitable - I admit I haven't read much into this.

A shell script can easily manipulate gconf as well, using gconftool.

Gconf stores settings in XML files. You don't need Gconf to edit them, it just simplifies it.