Ubuntu
gnome-power-manager package

suspend often fails without any way to workaround

Asked by Ittay Dror

I have Jaunty on a T61 Thinkpad.

Often, when trying to suspend, the laptop will not suspend and after a few seconds of black screen will return to normal operation with the login screen to unlock.

Sometimes I get a message from gnome-power-manager (about vlc), sometimes a log message in the screen that some processes refuse to freeze.

Same thing if I try to hibernate.

The only thing I can do is shut down the laptop (otherwise it overheats or exhausts the battery and then crashes). This obviously consumes much of my time - need to wait to see that if the laptop manages to suspend, if not, login, shutdown, then when I arrive to my destination, boot (still a slow process, despite the work done for Jaunty), launch all my apps. this means that if i go to a client i always need to reserve a 10 minute buffer just for this procedure. It is worse if I'm in a hurry and forget to make sure the laptop suspended ok only to discover later it crashed.

In general, I understand that suspending may be a tricky business that can cause processes to fail if not properly done (though I don't remember having such problems in Windows). However, I think the process can be greatly improved:
1. if the freeze fails, why give me the unlock screen?
2. i want a gui wizard that will allow me to manage those processes that prevent suspend - see who they are have a choice to kill them and try again (have a choice of a counter that will automatically do that if i don't click something within X seconds), configure which processes i want to automatically kill the next time this happens, and how to restart them, etc.
3. improve things like gnome-power-manager so that applications do not prevent it from suspending (sometimes, killing it and restarting causes suspend to work fine, which suggests the problem is with gnome-power-manager)

Question information

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Ubuntu gnome-power-manager Edit question
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This question was originally filed as bug #380211.

Revision history for this message
Scott Howard (showard314) said : 		#1

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Karmic Koala. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/. Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

Revision history for this message
Ittay Dror (ittay-dror) said : 		#2

First, how can I reproduce it? Start working all day on the desktop cd? I'm sure that if I just load it, and try to suspend everything will work. And what happens when I reproduce? What information will it gather for you to fix the issue?

Second, I think that the comment is an attempt to brush this issue aside. The reason is that I did not open the bug asking for gnome-power-manager to be fixed, instead I asked for tools that will let me work around the issues that it has.

There is no reason why I should not be able to suspend my laptop in the same sense I should always be able to shut it down. In both cases I risk loosing data etc., but this is for me to decide.

So please, instead of asking me to reproduce a bug I did not ask to solve, why not focus on giving me tools to work around it (or better yet, analyze it, e.g., be able to say which application did not freeze)

I will not try to recreate the issue. There's no point in it.

Revision history for this message
Scott Howard (showard314) said : 		#3

I'm happy to answer your questions:

> First, how can I reproduce it? Start working all day on the desktop cd?

Loading a liveCD and testing suspend through the GNOME logout/quit sequence and a short timer would suffice. However, some bug reporters do run a fully installed development version of Karmic to test for long periods of time, which is helpful finding crashes in unique situations.

> I'm sure that if I just load it, and try to suspend everything will
> work. And what happens when I reproduce? What information will it gather
> for you to fix the issue?

Once the bug is reproducible in the development release we can gather information through the procedures outlined at:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingGNOMEPowerManager
http://projects.gnome.org/gnome-power-manager/bugs.html
When running the Karmic Development Release, Ubuntu will automatically run a tool called Apport which will collect crash stack traces and many of the necessary logs to debug and fix the bug:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport

>
> Second, I think that the comment is an attempt to brush this issue
> aside. The reason is that I did not open the bug asking for gnome-power-
> manager to be fixed, instead I asked for tools that will let me work
> around the issues that it has.

The "bugs" section at launchpad.net is used for fixing programming errors gnome-power-manager. If you'd like tools and workarounds, please seek support at the "answers" section of launchpad.net, ubuntuforums.org, or #ubuntu on freenode irc (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InternetRelayChat).

>
> There is no reason why I should not be able to suspend my laptop in the
> same sense I should always be able to shut it down. In both cases I risk
> loosing data etc., but this is for me to decide.

That is true, suspend should just work. Bug reporting and working to identify the cause of why you can't do that is the correct step to take. If you'd like to suggest new features or changes to how Ubuntu is currently working, post on the relevant developer mailing list (https://lists.ubuntu.com/).

>
> So please, instead of asking me to reproduce a bug I did not ask to
> solve, why not focus on giving me tools to work around it (or better
> yet, analyze it, e.g., be able to say which application did not freeze)

I'm sorry, but the first step to fixing programming errors is to recreate the bug or failure in the most up to date version of the software. If you'd like tools and workarounds, please seek support at the "answers" section of launchpad.net, ubuntuforums.org, or #ubuntu on freenode irc (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InternetRelayChat).

>
> I will not try to recreate the issue. There's no point in it.

I'm converting this bug to a question to better help the reporter and marking as "Invalid" since there is no Karmic debugging information and this bug is not eligible for SRU (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates).

Revision history for this message
Scott Howard (showard314) said : 		#4

The reporter is interested in a workaround for a Jaunty problem, and not interested in debugging in Karmic, so this bug was converted into a question. Bug #380211.

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#5

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.