&application; is a session daemon for the MATE Desktop that manages the power settings for your laptop or desktop computer. 2015-2020 MATE Documentation Team 2006-2009 Richard Hughes (richard@hughsie.com) MATE Documentation Team Richard Hughes MATE Documentation Team Richard Hughes richard@hughsie.com 2.0 2006-08-30 Richard Hughes richard@hughsie.com Richard Hughes To report a bug or make a suggestion regarding the &app; application or this manual, follow the directions in the &application; Contact Page. &application; mate-power-manager

&application; Manual mate-power-manager The &app; session daemon is a power management daemon for the MATE desktop

&app; is usually started in MATE startup, but you can manually start &app; by doing: Command line Type G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=PowerManager mate-power-manager --no-daemon, then press Return:

When &application; has started, the following notifications may be displayed.

You can disable this notification by changing the dconf key org.mate.power-manager notify-discharging.

You can disable this notification by changing the dconf key org.mate.power-manager notify-fully-charged. You will only get a repeat notification if your battery percentage charge drops below 95% and then is again fully charged. This prevents some machines from showing unwanted repeat notifications if the battery is incorrectly reporting the charged status.

When the battery is low, you will receive the following notification. You should consider switching to AC power really soon.

You can disable this notification by changing the dconf key org.mate.power-manager notify-low-power.

When the computer has run out of power, it will show this notification explaining what action is required. You can change the critical low action using the preferences tool.

When a Suspend Failure occurs you may get this following warning. The most common reason for this notification is that the current user does not have permission to suspend or hibernate the computer.

You can disable this notification by changing the dconf key org.mate.power-manager notify-sleep-failed.

The statistics program allows you to visualize the power consumption of your laptop hardware. This has been removed from the information window of previous versions of &app; as the data interface is now using DBUS rather than internal IPC. This allows other applications to query and display the data if required.

You may not see some options or graphs if your computer does not have the required hardware. You may also see other hardware not shown here (for example UPS devices) but these are treated the same way as other devices.

This graph shows the available percentage of charge for the composite primary battery, so if you have a main laptop battery and an auxiliary battery then only the averaged value will be shown. A legend is not shown with this graph.

This graph shows the power history charge used by the composite primary battery. This line represents the amount of power that is either being used to charge the batteries in the system, or the power being used by the system from the batteries. You should see the line go up when processor intensive tasks are performed, and down when the system is at idle, or when the screen is dimmed. A legend is shown with this graph when data events have been received. You will not receive rate data from your computer if it is not charging or discharging, or if the computer is suspended. This is due to hardware limitations where the rate is only sent from the battery management chip, rather than the power management chip on the motherboard.

This graph shows the estimated charge history for the composite primary battery. This line represents the amount of time required until charged, or the amount of time until discharge. This line should go proportionally up when the rate decreases and down when the rate increases. A legend is shown with this graph when data events have been received.

The preferences window allows you to control: The LCD brightness when on AC and battery power The idle time for the screen power-down and suspend action The actions to perform when the laptop lid is closed The notification area icon policy Some sliders or option boxes may be disabled if the dconf policy keys are not writable. This allows administrators to lock-down the actions that a user can select.

This allows a powerful computer to reduce the power usage when idle, or when the full capabilities are not required.

mate-screensaver is a session daemon that monitors user input, and if the mouse has not been moved, or the keyboard been pressed then it starts a timeout. When the value of this timeout reaches the value set in mate-screensaver-preferences, then the login is marked as 'session idle'. This is when &application; performs all the session idle actions such as enabling low-power mode and lowering the laptop panel brightness.

As soon as the session is marked at idle, &application; starts its own 'system' timer. When the timeout set in mate-power-preferences is reached, and the CPU load is idle, then the idle action is performed, which is usually to turn off the screen, or to suspend or hibernate. To make this clearer, the sliders in mate-power-preferences are set to start at the value of the session-timeout + 1 minute, as we cannot logically trigger before the session is marked as idle. If you adjust the value of the 'session idle' timeout in mate-screensaver-preferences then the start of the sliders in mate-power-preferences will change accordingly.

You can change the idle laptop panel brightness by changing the dconf key org.mate.power-manager idle-brightness.

By default, &application; supports a simple locking scheme. This means that the screen will lock if set to "Lock screen" in mate-screensaver when the lid is closed, or the system performs a suspend or hibernate action. There is a complex locking scheme available for power users that allows locking policy to change for the lid, suspend and hibernate actions. To enable this complex mode, you will have to disable the dconf key: org.mate.power-manager lock-use-screensaver Then the policy keys can be set to force a mate-screensaver lock and unlock when the action is performed: org.mate.power-manager lock-blank-screen org.mate.power-manager lock-suspend org.mate.power-manager lock-hibernate The lock policy for mate-screensaver is ignored until the simple mode is re-enabled.

The brightness applet allows the user to change the brightness temporarily without changing the default policy. This may be useful if you have got a laptop without brightness buttons, as you can now change the brightness easily.

You will not get the slider if your hardware is not supported.

The Inhibit Applet allows the user to prevent the computer auto-sleeping when inactive. This may be required with old or proprietary programs such as VMWare or Matlab. Just click the icon for the auto-suspend to be inhibited, and click it again for normal operation.

Don't use this applet if you just use MATE software, instead file a bug to make the application use the Inhibit() and UnInhibit() methods as this should 'just work'.

These are questions the mailing list gets asked frequently.

Capacity is how much charge your battery can store compared to its manufacturer's guidelines.

The Suspend state is a power saving feature which is the lowest level of power consumption that preserves program data on the computer's memory. When your computer is in the Suspended state, computation will not be performed until normal activity is resumed. It will not resume until signaled by an external event such as a keyboard button press. It generally takes a few seconds to suspend and then resume your computer. You still use a small amount of battery power while suspended, so is not recommended for the low power action. If you remove AC power on a desktop, or run out of battery power on a laptop then you will lose your work. The Hibernation state saves the complete state of the computer to hard disk and turns off the power, so that the computer appears to be off. It will not resume until signaled by an external event such as a keyboard button press. This is the lowest power sleeping state available. If you remove AC power on a desktop, or run out of battery power on a laptop then work will not be lost. It can take up to a minute or more to hibernate and wake your computer.

You have to change the DPMS suspend mode &application; uses. Open dconf-editor, and then change the keys org.mate.power-manager dpms-method-ac and org.mate.power-manager dpms-method-battery to one of the modes that work, e.g. standby, suspend or off.

You might be able to use the percentage charge for g-p-m to use as the policy data. Open dconf-editor, and then change the key org.mate.power-manager use-time-for-policy to false. You can do this easily by doing: gsettings get org.mate.power-manager use-time-for-policy false This should get the policy actions working for you, but of course the time remaining will still be incorrect.

If your application is doing a long operation, you might want to disable the ability to suspend for a little while. You should use mate-session if you really don't want the user to be able to suspend, or for the computer to save power by hibernating or suspending.

One of two things might be the problem. HAL might not be running the add-on that captures the ACPI event. You BIOS could be faulty, and might need a work-around. Please send a bug report. For the first case, try to find the HAL processes that are running: ps -eaf | grep hal And check for the process hald-addon-acpi. If it is not being run, then please make sure that HAL is being run with the --retain-privileges option in the haldaemon initscript. An alternative to this is to use acpid, rather than the kernel proc file.