I haven't been able to dig up much about this on google or on Mandriva's forums, so I'm asking about it here. This is a stock installation of Mandriva 2009.1 Spring with the most recent updates applied. My problem is that no matter what I do with the sliders in gnome power manager or the screensaver, my computer won't suspend automatically. I find this strange because I can hibernate or suspend manually. Anyone else run across this problem?

I also tried to install Xfce from the official repo yesterday and it runs very slowly. When I click on anything, it take it about 10 or seconds for a program to open or a menu to appear. What gives? I haven't been able to find anything about this one either. And it isn't my hardware as I have an AMD Athlon 64 x2 and 2 GB of RAM. Any help on these would be very much appreciated.

Bump

Is anyone out there?

These are usually very hardware specific issues. First lets start with your full hardware specs.

whoops, was in class at the time you posted. Didn't log in until now. I have a Biostar MCP6PB M2+ with onboard nVidia geforce 6150, and Intel compatible sound that either shows up as realtek or nvidia/intel HDA. It depend on the application. See first post for processor and RAM. The gnome power thing isn't really that bad, but Xfce not working is a bad sign if I want to put Mandriva on a laptop.

nForce AMD chipsets tend to be problematic. Are you running the non-free nvidia drivers or the free nv?
You can use Mandriva Control Center to try various options under 'Set up the graphical server'.
Such as disabling Render, Composite(Transparency) or Accelerated Cursor.
If that fails, try switching btwn nv and nvidia to see which works for you.

For the XFCE issue, you can run 'top' in a console while using it to see what's sucking up all the CPU power. The experience may be completely different on another machine. I've run XFCE on Mandriva & it work beautifully.

Sorry about lag time, my SIP was being a pain. I am using the proprietary nvidia driver as compiz wont work otherwise. As far as xfce, I can't find whats sucking up the resources Maybe it's a conflict with gnome?

It's more likely compiz/composting that is causing it. Use MCC to turn off compiz, then login to XFCE again.
XFCE has it's own compositor, but if you use MCC to turn compiz on, it replaces XFCE's window manager which might be what's causing the issues.

Okay, I'm going to have to thank you for that. That's exactly what it was! But why? Xfce should automatically detect whether or not there is already a composite manager running. If two composite mangers attempt to run at the same time, shouldn't that crash the X server? Anyway, I used MCC to disable Compiz and then I chose Metisse, which turned out to have most the same features as Compiz (at least the ones that I cared about) and it doesn't seem to conflict with Xfce in any way. Very nice, though a little strange at first

Now if I can just teach Mandriva that it's okay to hibernate when nobody touches the keyboard and mouse for about an hour, then I can look forward to a lower power bill. If anyone out there knows what needs to be done (within reason) to Mandriva do this, please speak up! I can't be the only one in the entire universe that has one of these boards and runs Linux on it.

On Compiz & XFCE. Well apparently XFCE used to work with compiz untill they decided to implement their own compositor. I can understand why though, compiz is tied to gnome, so I guess the XFCE guys don't wanna drag along those dependencies. It's the same reason why KDE4 has it's own compositor.

On power management, if you can suspend & hibernate manually, then it's probably not an ACPI issue. It could be some piece of hardware or software not idling, keeping the system bz, so the countdown keeps restarting. You could try using top and powertop to monitor the system & see what's keeping the system bz.
I also recommend disabling the MSEC periodic checks. This often causes my system to stay on all night.

Sorry for not posting back sooner, classes and homework kept me. MSEC is a possible culprit. For some reason, the screensaver will kick in on its own and even put my monitor to sleep, but the computer itself stays on until I do something manually. I will try to learn how to mess with it on my own, but if I can't get it stop those checks, I'll post back.

Also, another thing about Compiz. It's not tied to Gnome per say. If you look in CCSM, you'll see an option for it to use a flat file config backend. You can also turn on the commands plugin to turn the Alt-F2 run box back on. Personally, I don't think devs should have just one "on size fits all" compiz package. They should have three different packages designed specifically for each of the major desktops.