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Thursday, 8 November 2007

Debian sid, gnome-power-manager suspend/hibernate and a ThinkPad X31

In my process of getting the laptop ready to be used I ran in a little problem really annoying: gnome-power-manager wasn't able to suspend nor to hibernate the laptop.

Luckily (after half an hour of googling) I found this in gnome power manager mailing list.
Have a look at /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf and change the at_console="true" line to user="username_of_you". Then restart dbus.

And that made the trick :D

(I also added myself to powerdev group... you never know ;) )
adduser [myuser] powerdev

9 comments:

  1. Awesome, man!

    I've been reading about this all day. I use Debian testing and, it refused to hibernate or suspend. Now, it works!

    And was so simple.

    Nice discover of you. I problably wouldn't find that tread in Google.

    Cheers

    ReplyDelete
  2. Awesome, man!

    I've been reading about this all day. I use Debian testing and, it refused to hibernate or suspend. Now, it works!

    And was so simple.

    Nice discover of you. I problably wouldn't find that tread in Google.

    Cheers [brunosilva.org]

    ReplyDelete
  3. As the file /usr/share/doc/gnome-power-manager/README.Debian ssays, it's sufficient to add the user you want to the 'powerdev' group. If you study the /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf configuration file, you will notice right below the '<policy at_console="true">' entry, an entry named '<policy group="powerdev">' which allows said group to send anything under "org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement".

    ReplyDelete
  4. As the file /usr/share/doc/gnome-power-manager/README.Debian says, it's sufficient to add the user you want to the 'powerdev' group. If you study the /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf configuration file, you will notice right below the '<policy at_console="true">' entry, an entry named '<policy group="powerdev">' which allows said group to send anything under "org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement".

    ReplyDelete
  5. Well I did that as well, as I said, you never know :D

    stezz

    ReplyDelete
  6. now the question is, why doesn't the debian default configuration *do the right thing* and add new users to the powerdev group? security, presumably, but before doing this fix, I could already do "gnome-power-cmd hibernate" froma command line and hibernate without elevated priviledges, because of the at_console="true" line. So it's a wash, security wise, it just makes the gooey buttons not work.

    but if you want automagic, i guess you use ubuntu :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. oh, and the suspend/hibernate f-key functions worked, AS LONG AS gnome wasn't running, or more specifically gnome-power-manager. So I think I should put this to the package maintainer, since I fail to see any security policy being enforced clearly.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I don't know exactly why it doesn't add new users, but it's pretty annoying to remember to do that each time you create one...

    ReplyDelete