I think we should "start" the beginning of the slider in g-p-p with the value set in gnome-screensaver-preferences. Jon, how does that sound to you?

Or should the wording just change to "Put display to sleep when *session* is inactive for:" and then explain the session / system thing in the yelp file.

I don't think that many would read a 'session being inactive' as the time you set in the screensaver preferences for the screensaver.

I am personally against (and I do not believe I am alone) needing to read the help file before something makes sense.

I have to confess that the whole thing seems bizzare to me - if I am having the screen turn off, I don't need a screensaver and so to force the user edit preferences for both seems messy.

The nicest outcome, in my opinion, would be to have the screen-blanking setting entirely separate and not at all related to Gnome Screensaver (except, possibly allowing the user to set it in the screensaver preferences as they can in Windows). I understand that you are saying that the 'idle' time is taken from the screensaver so that this option is not possible.

If that is the case, I think that the 'inactivity before the screen goes blank' needs to be the total time between when they stop being active on the machine to when the screen goes blank. This leads, in my mind, to several options:
- Just display the total time in the label and not let the user slide any lower than the setting in G-S.
- Have a slider to adjust the G-S time above the blanking slider so that people can see they can't have one lower than the other, the blanking time being a cumulative total time (would feel unusual as people wouldn't understand why they couldn't set a blanking time equal to or less than the screensaver time).
- Show the total time, say nothing to the user about G-S, and lower the setting for G-S in the background to be the minimum amount possible less (1 minute?) than the target time for the screen to blank. This would mean that I set my screen to blank after, say, 6 minutes of inactivity and GPM would change gnome-screensaver, without telling the user, to go on after 5 and would set the screen to blank after 1 minute of g-s inactivity.

I think the last is the best of those options, but feel that all are messy when the user will think inactivity has nothing to do with Gnome-Screensaver.

>The nicest outcome, in my opinion, would be to have the screen-blanking setting
>entirely separate and not at all related to Gnome Screensaver

No can do, the inhibit stuff is linked in. Think of gnome screensaver declaring the session idle, and then g-p-m waiting a set time until it does certain actions.

I do think we have to explain things better.

I've just commited this:

2006-04-02  Richard Hughes  <richard@hughsie.com>
 * src/gpm-prefs-core.c, src/gpm-screensaver.{c|h}, src/gpm-manager.c, src/Makefile.am: Use an instance of GpmScreensaver in g-p-p so we can connect to the g-s-p idle delay settings. Move the slider so that it starts at the g-s-p setting.

Can you try g-p-m HEAD and tell me what you think please?

Thanks.

Sorry Richard, I don't know how to compile sources. Could you either give me instructions or post an Ubuntu .deb?

Erm, will a debian deb do?

Yes, that should be more than fine :). Sorry to be a pain.

I have done a lot of thinking about this bug since I posted it and I think that I have come up with an optimal solution. Let me first explain what I see as the essential problem:
- It would make more sense to all involved if g-p-m had nothing to do with gnome-screensaver, but that isn't possible because g-p-m wants to use the gnome-screensaver monitor for whether the session is idle. The gnome-screensaver is essentially a binary announcement which only occurs once the setting has been idle for the time set in the screensaver settings, so it is only after this time that gpm can start counting.

Wouldn't it be an ideal solution if gnome-screensaver could be modified to announce (via DBUS or otherwise) how many minutes there had been no activity. Every minute there could be a:
Inactivity = 60
Inactivity = 120
...

This would mean that the screensaver could be set to come on (or become 'idle') at whatever time, but gpm could independently watch this channel and perform power management functions irrespective of the settings for the screensaver. This would allow gpm to avoid duplicated effort and use the idle from gnome-screensaver, but would give the benefits of independence. What are your thoughts on this approach?

You can't de-couple g-s and g-p-m. Read: http://live.gnome.org/GnomePowerManager/Faq#head-b76532b07f369f7b952b9c9d35026f0e4c4ce622 and you'll see why. The concept of "session idle" is bigger than just a timeout.

Hi Richard. Thanks for the link as I didn't know that.

Is the concept bigger than inhibits as well? If not then G-S could just announce:

Inactivity = 60
Inhibited = False

Inactivity = 120
Inhibited = False

I fully accept that there are difficulties here, but think that this is quite an issue. Do you agree there is a problem to be solved? As I see it, when everything used for gpm is open sourced, there must be a proper solution to any problem.

A casual user will not understand why their blanking settings depend on their screensaver settings (and they shouldn't). One also (as I understand it) could not have their laptop set to blank the screen on batteries after 1 or 2 minutes and have a screensaver come on when on AC after 10 minutes. This is in addition to other limitations that will no doubt surface when gpm wants to add new features. 

I'm trying to be helpful, so I hope I am not being too much of a pain.

You can find a .deb here;

http://gnome-power.sourceforge.net/data/debian/

Richard.

Hi Richard,

I just tried to give that a go but need the 0.6.1 version of libdbus-1-2 instead of the 0.6 version available in the Ubuntu repositories. Can someone please point me to a .deb of that file? I tried to google it with little luck.

Thanks

I think debian unstable has such a deb.

Thanks Richard,

I have installed the .debs and all seems to be working fine :). I much prefer that it puts the total time in there. I'll be interested to see how frequently you close bugs titled "GPM screen blanking time should be able to be set to less than 15 minutes" ;).

Looks like a good fix - any chance of getting it into Dapper?

Created attachment 63351 [details]
Icon when charging

When charging the battery, I got this icon. When I took the plug out and put it back in, it changed to the normal icon.

Created attachment 63352 [details]
Power information

This is my power information. It seems odd that my battery is apparently in Battery Bay #2, but for all I know it could be.

Created attachment 63353 [details]
Warning when I first started GPM

This is the warning I got when I first started GPM after upgrading. The close button didn't work and I had to click the [X].

Should I file all these things separately - you have really solved the bug that I first raised :)?

Yes, the original bug is fixed. It's unlikely this will be backported to dapper as there are substantial changes to the codebase to make this possible.

The crazy "broken" icon you got is g-p-m saying "the battery is not reporting it's charging or discharging and it's not > 90% full yet" -- i.e. acpi is confused. Can you open another bug for this if it is reproducable.

And as for the gconf warning, you *really* have to install the gconf schema, which the .deb might not have done, I don't know. You can do this manually using:

export GCONF_CONFIG_SOURCE=`gconftool-2 --get-default-source`
gconftool-2 --makefile-install-rule data/gnome-power-manager.schemas
killall -HUP gconfd-2

Richard.

The broken icon has gone.

I did my best to follow your directions with the gconf thing, but:

aaron@Zyanya:~$ export GCONF_CONFIG_SOURCE=`gconftool-2 --get-default-source`
aaron@Zyanya:~$ gconftool-2 --makefile-install-rule data/gnome-power-manager.schemas
Resolved address "xml:merged:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults" to a read-only configuration source at position 0
None of the resolved addresses are writable; saving configuration settings will not be possible
I/O warning : failed to load external entity "data/gnome-power-manager.schemas"
Failed to open `data/gnome-power-manager.schemas': No such file or directory
aaron@Zyanya:~$ sudo gconftool-2 --makefile-install-rule data/gnome-power-manager.schemas
Resolved address "xml:merged:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults" to a writable configuration source at position 0
I/O warning : failed to load external entity "data/gnome-power-manager.schemas"
Failed to open `data/gnome-power-manager.schemas': No such file or directory

I'd like to stay on the new version so that I can be debugging the latest version, but if it is going to be difficult I can always revert to the Dapper debs now that the screen-blanking thing has been fixed :).

Thanks

I think you need to install the schemas as root.

Sorry Richard, even that doesn't work.

$ sudo export GCONF_CONFIG_SOURCE=`gconftool-2 --get-default-source`
sudo: export: command not found

The export command worked for my user.

export is a bash builtin, so I'm not sure why that doesn't work. Next time I'm on IRC ( freenode, #hal) msg me and I'll try and sort this one out, or you can post on the m/l if you don't do IRC, and I'm sure there's a debianer somewhere :-)

(In reply to comment #17)
> This is my power information. It seems odd that my battery is apparently in
> Battery Bay #2, but for all I know it could be.

I've fixed this in CVS, I was prepending, not appending a list.

I'll mark it as fixed, as the original bug is fixed.

Richard.

Thanks a lot, Richard. I've gone back to 2.14, to test out the Beta of Dapper, and this prevents the GConf error. I may come back to the problem in the future, however! Launchpad has already been marked as committed :).