gnome-power-manager and DPMS

[Vitus Jensen]

Hej!

I'm running gnome on a Thinkpad R51e and noticed for some time now that
the screen is no longer automatically dimmed when I leave the laptop idle
for some minutes. Perhaps a recent update broke that feature?

Anyway, what I would like to get on battery power is

- idle for 30s -> dim screen
- idle for 3 minutes -> dpms off
- idle for 15 minutes -> suspend to RAM

What I get is no dimming on idle, a blank screen as screensaver after 3
minutes (fully backlighted :-D) and suspend after some more time. So it's
the missing dimming and the backlight when the screensaver has blanked the
screen. Can g-p-m or g-s be instructed to use dpms as a screensaver or
should I use "xset dpms 0 0 180" to let X11 do the work?

gnome 2.26.3, gnome-power-manager 2.22.1, gnome-screensaver 2.26.1 (gentoo
stable).

How are your laptops using DPMS powersaving features?

Vitus

PS: I created a new user and checked the behaviour: it's definitely not a
borked user configuration.

--
Vitus Jensen, Hannover, Germany, Earth, Universe (current)

[Vitus Jensen]

On Sun, 29 Nov 2009, Vitus Jensen wrote:

> I'm running gnome on a Thinkpad R51e and noticed for some time now that the
> screen is no longer automatically dimmed when I leave the laptop idle for
> some minutes. Perhaps a recent update broke that feature?
>
> Anyway, what I would like to get on battery power is
>
> - idle for 30s -> dim screen
> - idle for 3 minutes -> dpms off
> - idle for 15 minutes -> suspend to RAM
>
> What I get is no dimming on idle, a blank screen as screensaver after 3
> minutes (fully backlighted :-D) and suspend after some more time. So
> it's the missing dimming and the backlight when the screensaver has
> blanked the screen. Can g-p-m or g-s be instructed to use dpms as a
> screensaver or should I use "xset dpms 0 0 180" to let X11 do the work?
>
> gnome 2.26.3, gnome-power-manager 2.22.1, gnome-screensaver 2.26.1 (gentoo
> stable).

Further analyse shows that there is no DBus signal on session idle, so
gnome-power-manager has no chance to dim the display. Downgrading
gnome-extra/gnome-screensaver to 2.24.1-r1 produces DBus events so dimming
will happen.
It seems this has effects on dpms, too. The current situation is now

- idle for 30s -> dim screen

- idle for 5 minutes -> blank screen (backlight on)
- idle for 6 minutes -> dpms off

- idle for 15 minutes -> suspend to RAM

I can live with this backlighted blank screen for 1 minutes.

Vitus

PS: I filed a bug on those missing DBus events,
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=295227