Current: xfce4-power-manager not working

burdi01 · 06-10-2015, 04:44 AM

Current: xfce4-power-manager 1.4.4 and upower 0.9.23.
The xfce-power-manager does not work. All it does is showing a dumb systray icon with a "Display battery levels for attached devices" tooltip.
In the /var/log/messages file I see a lot of these messages:

Code:

Jun 10 11:30:40 riposo dbus[1973]: [system] Activated service 'org.freedesktop.UPower' failed: Launch helper exited with unknown return code 127

The output of a "xfce4-power-manager --debug" is attached below. In there I see the same "Launch helper exited" messages for xfce4-power-manager as well as libupower-glib.

Drakeo · 06-10-2015, 05:08 AM

I would rebuild pkg "upower" from currents source it is in the "a" or reinstall it you may have a broken link. with out it it will not set up the devices.
make sure you have power checked in your users groups

ReaperX7 · 06-10-2015, 12:03 PM

Good way to test upower and xfce4-power-manager:

Code:

upower -v && upower -d && xfce4-power-manager -V && xfce4-power-manager --dump

Can you run this and post the results?

burdi01 · 06-11-2015, 03:05 AM

@Drakeo: Upower was rebuilt as part of the Apr 21 update, so another rebuild should not be necessary. Anyway, I will do a rebuild.

Code:

root@riposo:~/works# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root),1(bin),2(daemon),3(sys),4(adm),6(disk),7(lp),10(wheel),11(floppy),17(audio),18(video),19(cdrom),86(netdev),93(scanner),199(vfat)
root@riposo:~/works#

Code:

burdi01@riposo:~$ id
uid=1000(burdi01) gid=100(users) groups=100(users),7(lp),11(floppy),17(audio),18(video),19(cdrom),83(plugdev),84(power),86(netdev),93(scanner),199(vfat)
burdi01@riposo:~$

@ReaperX7: On a freshly started system I ran "xfce4-power-manager --quit" and then scripted your command for root. I had to replace the "&&"s to get a meaningful output. I then rebooted the system, quit the powermanager again and scripted your command for user "burdi01". The outputs are attached.

As an aside: The commands were run on my desktop, so no battery and backlight. On my laptop the results are comparable.

burdi01 · 06-11-2015, 03:52 AM

Just to be sure I cloned my Slackware Current Multilib to my laptop once again. Repeating the commands indeed gave the same errors/warnings. However, it dawned upon me that the systray icon is not as dumb as I thought: it is "just" missing the Hibernate/Suspend options as well as the Power Information and the Help/About/Quit ones I saw previously. There is no battery percentage (even when there is a battery). But on my laptop it now includes a working brightness applet.

So we have two problems here:
1) Batteries not being detected;
2) No Hibernate/Suspend.

Ad 1: I assume that is what the errors/warnings are about.

Ad 2: I vaguely remember having read something about the hibernate/suspend options being moved from upower to somewhere else. To me it looks like that is what is the case here. I will need to do some digging to find out what that "somewhere else" was again ...
Actually Start > Log Out > {Suspend,Hibernate} does not work either.

ReaperX7 · 06-11-2015, 07:37 AM

Rebuild xfce4-power-manager.

We've had a few packages turn up with the wrong library links from time to time, and this is one of them probably.

Make sure you use 'upgradepkg --reinstall' when you reinstall xfce4-power-manager.

Afterwards run that check I gave you again and we'll see if it's fixed.

burdi01 · 06-12-2015, 08:21 AM

Rebuilding xfce4-powermanager 1.4.4 from http://www.slackware.org.uk/slackwar...power-manager/ and installing the resultant package made no discernable difference. However rebuilding upower -.9.23 from http://www.slackware.org.uk/slackwar...urce/a/upower/ and installing the resultant package did: the libupower-glib warnings are gone and the preferences dialog gained a Devices tab -- see the attached screenshot.

But the systray icon still does not indicate the battery percentage and the Hibernate/Suspend options are still missing from it. However, the Suspend option from the Start > Log Out dialog now works on the laptop -- but not on my desktop.
The screen brightness applet from the systray as well as the keyboard Fn+F{7,8} still work on the laptop -- but not on my desktop.

I had a look at newer versions: for upower there is a 0.99.3 version, but running with that version caused missing symbols. For as far as I can see there is no newer version of the xfce4-power-manager.

ReaperX7 · 06-12-2015, 12:34 PM

Don't use 0.99.3!!! It's evil!!! EEEEEEEVIIIIIIIL!!! *cough hack gasp* ahem!

It says you have access to suspend and hibernate now, which is good. That's what you want to see.

Is ConsoleKit running at startup?

sysvinit (w/ Slackware default bsd-style rc scripts)

Code:

/etc/rc.d/rc.consolekit status

sysvinit (w/ OpenRC from SBo)

Code:

/etc/init.d/consolekit status

I actually have started asking this since we now have OpenRC available (thanks to Aaditya Bagga's excellent work) and people might be using it.

This step might pass and you still may not have the shutdown, reboot, suspend, hibernate buttons available.

There is a fix, and mostly it's somewhat due to Consolekit being a bit behind things. I've had this before too.

In my repository (listed below) is a build script package for ConsoleKit2-0.9.2. I would suggest trying it out if all else fails. There are some warnings shown about consolekit and xfce4-power-manager that look all to familiar.

burdi01 · 06-12-2015, 03:38 PM

Thank you for responding again.

I do not even have ConsoleKit installed. The package is mentioned in the 14.1 PACKAGES.TXT file, but not in the 14.1 CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT file. As a long time Current user I use the latter file to synchronize my Current installation upon every Stable release. So that it is understandable that I do not have it.

Anyway, installing the ConsoleKit 0.4.5 package nor your ConsoleKit2 0.9.2 one does not have any discernable effects other than removing the consolekit proxy message from the --dump output.

ReaperX7 · 06-12-2015, 09:30 PM

Check /var/log/packages first.

You'll have to rebuild xfce4-power-manager once again to add ConsoleKit support and include the user functions for halt.

burdi01 · 06-13-2015, 03:50 AM

First with ConsoleKit 0.4.5 and afterwards with your ConsoleKit2 0.9.2 I rebuilt the upower 0.9.23 and xfce4-power-manager 1.4.4 *) and installed them.
There were no visible differences as compared to yesterday's round.

*) The configure --help did not give options to include ConsoleKit support and the user functions for halt. I assume these are picked up automatically when present at build/run time.

burdi01 · 06-14-2015, 04:27 AM

I retained ConsoleKit 0.4.5 because without it (or ConsoleKit2 0.9.2) Start > Log Out > Shut Down does not work (Suspend does though).
I rebuilt xfce4-power-manager 1.2.0 from xfce 4.10 using the slackbuild I amended for Parted Magic some weeks ago.
Problem solved.

Thank you for your support.

Edit Jun 15, 2015: Google searches for and implementations of xfce4-power-manager 1.4.4 as found in other [live] distributions show the same deficiencies as I saw. So things are not related to pecularities in my installation.