Bug#478675: Reports a failed suspend with no reason when suspend would otherwise work

[Enrico Zini]

Package: gnome-power-manager
Version: 2.22.1-1
Severity: normal

Hello,

thank you for maintaining gnome-power-manager.

In the new laptop, if I hit the suspend to ram hotkey,
gnome-power-manager will tell me something like (translated from Italian
back to English): "Problem suspending.  The computer failed to suspend.
Check help for common problems.  [Don't show this notice] [Visit the
website]".

I would have expected at least an error message about what failed, or a
pointer to a log file that I could use to debug the problem.  Syslog
just has this:

  Apr 30 09:56:04 viaza gnome-power-manager: (enrico) Sospensione del computer. Motivo: Il pulsante di sospensione è stato premuto.
  Apr 30 09:56:04 viaza gnome-power-manager: (enrico) Ripristino del computer
  Apr 30 09:56:04 viaza gnome-power-manager: (enrico) suspend failed

  syslog messages in Italian?  Whoever designed this really did not
  want to help people to report bugs.  Anyway, here is a translation:

  Apr 30 09:56:04 viaza gnome-power-manager: (enrico) Suspend the computer.  Reason: the suspend key has been pressed
  Apr 30 09:56:04 viaza gnome-power-manager: (enrico) Resume the computer
  Apr 30 09:56:04 viaza gnome-power-manager: (enrico) suspend failed

/var/log/messages and /var/log/user.log have exactly the same lines.  No
other log file seems to have been touched in /var/log or any of its
subdirectories.  Damn.

Note: pm-suspend as root works, as well as s2ram.

So I click [visit the website], which points here:

  http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/quirk/

At least it should point here:
http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/quirk/quirk-suspend-index.html
since the error comes out of a suspend attempt and had nothing to do
with hotkeys or brightness.

The page does not mention anything like "if you are here because
gnome-power-manager told you to come here, do this", so you are left
basically going through every link, in the hope to find anything useful.

"I want to check common problems and to find quirks to try" looks like a
useful thing, so I go there.

I download quirk-checker.sh, read the source[1], run it and it tells me
that I have no quirks, everything is fine.

Then I go in "Other things to check", and the first thing it asks me to
do is to run: 'rpm -q hal-info | cut -f3 -d"-"'.  Fail: I'm on a Debian
system.  This is so shortsighted that I am left in awe.
I paste the output of "dpkg -s hal-info | grep ^Version | cut -d' ' -f2-"
and keep going.  Luckily the package has the same name.

I go through the various questions; you try to answer them properly for
my case if you can: they are all formulated with some assuption in mind
that in my case does not apply.  Anyway, I reverse engineer the asker's
intentions, fill them all up as well as I can and I get lots of smily
happy faces, and no useful message.

Stuck.

So now, while having a laptop that is perfectly able to suspend and
resume, thanks to gnome-power-manager deciding not to do it and
providing no reason whatsoever, I have to use this interesting sequence:

  sleep 5; pm-suspend
  go and lock the screen manually

It really is a very worrying sign when, on a Debian system, the UI gets
in the way so much that it outright prevents any problem solving.


Ciao,

Enrico


[1] seriously, since when are we supposed to tell the users to download
a script from untrusted random places in the web and run it as root?


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=it_IT.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=it_IT.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages gnome-power-manager depends on:
ii  gconf2                 2.22.0-1          GNOME configuration database syste
ii  hal                    0.5.11~rc2-1      Hardware Abstraction Layer
ii  libart-2.0-2           2.3.20-1          Library of functions for 2D graphi
ii  libatk1.0-0            1.22.0-1          The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libbonobo2-0           2.22.0-1          Bonobo CORBA interfaces library
ii  libbonoboui2-0         2.22.0-1          The Bonobo UI library
ii  libc6                  2.7-10            GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libcairo2              1.4.14-1          The Cairo 2D vector graphics libra
ii  libdbus-1-3            1.2.1-1           simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2       0.74-2            simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libfontconfig1         2.5.0-2           generic font configuration library
ii  libfreetype6           2.3.5-1+b1        FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib
ii  libgconf2-4            2.22.0-1          GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libglade2-0            1:2.6.2-1         library to load .glade files at ru
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.16.1-2          The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnome-keyring0      2.22.1-1          GNOME keyring services library
ii  libgnome2-0            2.20.1.1-1        The GNOME 2 library - runtime file
ii  libgnomecanvas2-0      2.20.1.1-1        A powerful object-oriented display
ii  libgnomeui-0           2.20.1.1-1        The GNOME 2 libraries (User Interf
ii  libgnomevfs2-0         1:2.22.0-2        GNOME Virtual File System (runtime
ii  libgstreamer0.10-0     0.10.19-3         Core GStreamer libraries and eleme
ii  libgtk2.0-0            2.12.9-2          The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libhal1                0.5.11~rc2-1      Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libice6                2:1.0.4-1         X11 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii  libnotify1 [libnotify1 0.4.4-3           sends desktop notifications to a n
ii  liborbit2              1:2.14.12-0.1     libraries for ORBit2 - a CORBA ORB
ii  libpanel-applet2-0     2.20.3-3          library for GNOME Panel applets
ii  libpango1.0-0          1.20.2-2          Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libpng12-0             1.2.15~beta5-3    PNG library - runtime
ii  libpopt0               1.10-3            lib for parsing cmdline parameters
ii  libsm6                 2:1.0.3-1+b1      X11 Session Management library
ii  libwnck22              2.22.1-1          Window Navigator Construction Kit 
ii  libx11-6               2:1.0.3-7         X11 client-side library
ii  libxcursor1            1:1.1.9-1         X cursor management library
ii  libxext6               2:1.0.4-1         X11 miscellaneous extension librar
ii  libxfixes3             1:4.0.3-2         X11 miscellaneous 'fixes' extensio
ii  libxi6                 2:1.1.3-1         X11 Input extension library
ii  libxinerama1           2:1.0.3-1         X11 Xinerama extension library
ii  libxml2                2.6.31.dfsg-2     GNOME XML library
ii  libxrandr2             2:1.2.2-1         X11 RandR extension library
ii  libxrender1            1:0.9.4-1         X Rendering Extension client libra
ii  notification-daemon    0.3.7-1+b1        a daemon that displays passive pop
ii  zlib1g                 1:1.2.3.3.dfsg-12 compression library - runtime

gnome-power-manager recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information