XFCE power manager, LID close options have no effect

[Mișu Moldovan]

On 11 June 2013 17:55, Miro Hrončok <miro at hroncok.cz> wrote:
> Systemd might be putting your computer to sleep:
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd#ACPI_power_management

One more reason for me to stay away from that...

On a related note, I have tried Google Chrome and seen it output
thinks like the following:

[20887:20914:0610/140513:ERROR:object_proxy.cc(529)] Failed to call
method: org.freedesktop.PowerManagement.Inhibit.Inhibit: object_path=
/org/freedesktop/PowerManagement/Inhibit:
org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name
org.freedesktop.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files

So I've installed xfce4-power-manager to make it happy. To my
surprise, from time to time the screen started to wake up by itself
afterwards. I must say I usually put the display on sleep when leaving
the computer using "xset dpms force off" assigned to the Pause key. A
habit I acquired using tablets and caring for battery life. But hey, I
know best when the screen should go to sleep, so why not save a few
watts by not letting it keep working for the 5 minutes it takes X to
automatically send it to sleep? Saving the planet and all that... For
the record, I use "xset dpms 300 450 600" in a script executed when
launching Xfce.

Anyway, so I got a bit angry about the screen playing games with me
and decided to uninstall xfce4-power-manager. And not only that, I
also got rid of the whole upower / udisks / policykit / consolekit
shebang. Must say I'm as happy as I've ever been in regards to power
management... My hard drives now spin down under X just the same as do
I do in console mode, no need to learn to speak the udisks slang in
order to set up power management for my hard drives after already
setting them up with hdparm in this regard. Gotta say the settings
from xfce4-power-management for spinning down disks didn't work for me
at all.

The negative bits... When I watch an online video that takes more than
5 minutes I have to hit a key to avoid the screen going to sleep
automatically. I take it as a reminder that I should get back to doing
something more productive. I have also modified the cvlc script that
starts VLC to temporarily disable screen power management while
running. Also, I am no longer able to send the computer to sleep as
user. However, I was doing this from command line anyway (usually with
a custom delay) and things are actually much simpler as root.

Compare this:

    dbus-send --system --print-reply \
        --dest="org.freedesktop.UPower" \
        /org/freedesktop/UPower \
        org.freedesktop.UPower.Suspend

with this:

    echo mem > /sys/power/state

Everything being taken into account, I find it all worthy and in
addition I got rid of around 15 packages that most distros think I
need. Sorry, I don't! The same for systemd, I'm happy with init,
metalog, fcron etc. No need to reinvent the wheel...

Please excuse the rather long rant,

--
mișu