gnome-power-manager doesn't recognize "on battery"

[justin.waters]

I have a Pangolin (model panp5) running 64-bit Jaunty. When I unplug the AC power supply, the gnome-power-manager still reports "The computer is running on AC Power", although it does recognize that the battery is discharging. This has a number of side effects:

* The remaining life of the battery is not displayed; instead, it reports that "Battery discharge time is unknown"
* The screen does not automatically dim when unplugged, even though I have the "Reduce backlight brightness" selected for "On battery". In fact, it looks like none of the "On battery" settings are being used.
* The graphs for "Discharge time profile" and "Discharge time accuracy profile" under Power History are always 0.

If I click the applet, and select the battery, the "Device Information" box displays the correct information, including discharge time.

I do not experience this issue in a fresh install of 32-bit Jaunty on my Toshiba A105 laptop.

Is anybody else having any issues like this? I was able to find references to similar bugs on Ubuntu's launchpad, although none seemed to affect Jaunty.

EDIT: I also tried to reproduce the issue on my work laptop, a Compaq nx6325 with a fresh install of 64-bit Jaunty, but I was unable to. It doesn't look like it's a 32- vs 64-bit issue.

[thomasaaron]

This definitely is not a known problem in Jaunty. Could be a hosed upgrade from Intrepid.

Please boot from a live CD and see if the problem occurs there.

[justin.waters]

I'll try when I get home from work today.

However, I just received the computer on Friday from System76, with Jaunty pre-installed. I suppose it's possible that it was upgraded from Intrepid to Jaunty at the Factory, though, so I'll still give it a shot.

[thomasaaron]

They put a fresh Jaunty image on it at the factory. So that rules out a hosed upgrade.

Is there a suspend/resume cycle involved? Or does it do this after a fresh boot.

If there is a suspend/resume cycle involved, you may have found a bug. If not, we can try re-setting your cmos. That usually fixes such quirks. Send me an email, though, for instructions. support@system76...

[justin.waters]

I noticed that I wasn't getting a battery life estimate right out of the box, although I didn't investigate further until I noticed my severely reduced battery life (due to the screen not dimming). I don't typically use Suspend (I turned off suspend when the screen is closed after the first time it happened), so I'm leaning more towards the CMOS issue. I'll send you an e-mail.

[Guille Damke]

Hi,

I did a clean install of 9.04 amd64 a couple of weeks ago and I have exactly the same issue with the power-manager in a panp4n. I did 2 tests, I booted using a LiveCD to 9.04 and the problem was still there when pluging/unpluging the power cord. Then, I used a LiveCD for 8.10 and it could recognize when it was running on AC or battery power.
Any ideas? Are more users experiencing this problem?
I found a couple of users in the main forum with asking the same question, but nobody has answered yet.

[thomasaaron]

We've confirmed it on our shop PanP4n/5. It's definitely a gnome-power-manager bug.

[Guille Damke]

We've confirmed it on our shop PanP4n/5. It's definitely a gnome-power-manager bug.

Thank you for confirming it. Have you s76 guys filled any bug report about this? Do you have any idea when we can expect a fix? Or is it possible to temporally go back to an older version of gnome-power-manager which used to work in 8.10 until this is fixed?

[thomasaaron]

We are looking into this. There are some similar bug reports, but none of them quite hit the mark, and some are quite old, dating back to Edgy (although people are chiming in again after upgrading to Jaunty).

I don't know that I'd try to revert to a previous version, as I think you would have to actually compile Intrepids gnome-power-manage. Not sure what you might run into doing that.

[lnxguit]

I noticed my brand-new Pangolin wasn't aware when it was running on battery. I guess I'm glad I'm not the only one, but it's small comfort.
So, do we just track this thread in hopes of a fix?