Recently there has been a period of where gnome-power-manager wasn’t quite as stable and bug free as I would like. The reasons basically boil down to:
- Rewriting the engine to support DeviceKit-power rather than HAL
- Switching to using xbacklight rather than HAL to change the backlight (but falling back to HAL if xbacklight is not available)
- Rewriting the idle interactions to not rely on gnome-screensaver, but instead using gnome-session and X idletime
- Supporting HAL buttons and X buttons, and trying to filter out the duplicates
- Working around the fact that switching the monitor off using DPMS resets the IDLETIME…. urgh.
- Switching to using DeviceKit-power to do the suspend and hibernate, instead of using HAL
So, for the last few months I’ve been essentially trying to do the software equivalent of underpinning a house. I’ve spent the last couple of days adding more self check code, and fixing up the bugs that the new tests have found. Specifically, if your machine randomly switched off your display when you’re working, or when switching sessions didn’t restore your brightness correctly then git master probably might work for you.
Could people that have had problems, please try git master and give me success/failure as comments to the blog comment please. If the idletime and dimming stuff is 100% fixed now, then I’ll backport the fixes to stable and do a new release. Thanks.
p.s. If you change the value of GPM_USE_COMPOSITE in src/gpm-engine.c to 1 and recompile, then multiple batteries might work correctly too. Untested (still waiting for my ultra-bay battery to be delivered), so no promises.