display sleep time - why 11 minutes (gnome-power-preferences confusing to the users)

Sorry, should read - Why has the display sleep time ...........

This should be against package gnome-power-manager, I think...

But anyway, I agree with wpshooter -- why indeed can't I set my display shutoff timeout to below 11 minutes, especially given the fact that there is the time it takes to activate gnome-screensaver before that? In 11 minutes, on battery power, a significant portion of battery life could be lost.

I agree as well. 11 is also a weird number ... It could have at least been 10 . I'm not sure this is a gnome-power-manager, probably belongs to control-center.

Nah, it's gnome-power-manager indeed.

I don't even think 10 is appropriate. The user should have the ability to
bring it down to 1 minute if he so chooses to manage his battery consumption
so aggressively. On my core duo, the display backlight accounts for more
than 40% of total system power consumption, so it makes a big difference
whether or not the display gets turned off aggressively.

I am just wondering if somewhat 11 got placed somewhere in the code
instead of 1 ???

On Sat, 2006-09-09 at 16:51 +0000, Vassilis Pandis wrote:
> I agree as well. 11 is also a weird number ... It could have at least
> been 10 . I'm not sure this is a gnome-power-manager, probably belongs
> to control-center.
>
> ** Changed in: gnome-power-manager (Ubuntu)
> Importance: Untriaged => Medium
> Status: Unconfirmed => Confirmed
>

I don't know, but sounds likely. On current edgy, I see that the time has been reduced to 5 min. What's weird is that the .glade file ( /usr/share/gnome-power-manager/gpm-prefs.glade) specifies a minimum value of 1, not 5.

Please see the help file, in the "Preferences" section.

Richard, thanks for the pointer. I get it now. Still, isn't this a little bit cryptic?

Probably yes. Any idea how to convey the information better?

This is not be the best solution, but maybe a parenthesis could be added to the minimum value with something like "(see help for more information)".

On a similar note, maybe a label above it that is only visible when the minimum value is selected ?

Those interested should also read Bug #36568 and the upstream bugs that are linked to within that.

I still wonder whether +1 minute is accurate. I would rather like my laptop to put the display to sleep as soon as it is idle and not with a 1 minute delay.

On a related point, I'd like to set my laptop to hibernate after a long period of inactivity - currently this is 11-59 mins. I'd like to be able to set it to something much larger (like 4 hours). Any chance of a text entry box in addition to the slider (which can be quite fiddly/slow to use sometimes cf just typing)? Thanks.

>Any chance of a text entry box

No, it's against the GNOME HIG.

>something much larger (like 4 hours)

Why so long?

Could this be at least released to Hardy? The whole separation of ac and battery makes no sense if screen saver time is the basis. A screen saver after one minute is very annoying but locking after idle isn't possible without it.

I suspect the "11 minutes" minimum is coming from your system->preferences->screensaver being set to 11 minutes; the figure reported in the gnome power manager dialog seems to be offset by the screensaver amount (even though it doesn't seem to be implemented like that); I've reported a separate bug about this disparity between the UI and what actually happens:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-power-manager/+bug/190537

For now the best work around I can find is to set the gnome power manager display off timeout to be sufficiently large that the difference between that timeout and the screensaver timeout is the power off time that I actually want.

Ewen

Ewen McNeill is right.
"His" bug has been fixed. But this has not.
It's quite hard to figure out where the minimum is coming from. An easy solution would be to indicate on the form where this minimum is coming from (like Vassilis Pandis suggested).

I prefer 5,
so i think that be able to put a value up to 1 will be ok to everyone

Possible solutions that I propose:
1) Add a duplicate of screensaver-idle settings to gnome-power-preferences
2) Add some text explaining why the lowest value for putting display to sleep is X.

Just put the screensaver consider idle setting at 1 minute, so then you can put the display sleep time to as low as 2 minutes.

I don't know why anyone would want it lower than 2 minutes !!!

There is no obvious reason why it should not be possible to set it to "As soon as computer is idle". It would be much more intuitive, that the left border of the slider is "as soon as computer is idle" instead of "as soon as computer is idle + 1 minute".

KDE and Windows have at least two profiles. One for battery and one for ac. If I want to shutdown the display after one minute in Gnome it is not possible. If I set the screensaver to one minute shuting down the display is possible after two minutes but at the same time my screen gets locked after 1 minute of idle which is pretty annoying. The locking feature is important for a laptop so there is no workaround.
The whole thing is just stupid and I can only think of one advantage. If I set the display to go to sleep after one minute of idle time it shortly powers down after locking the screen manually and not after e.g. five minutes. But the penalties are much more worse.

Umm! if you think about the average user, even a stmt such as "As soon as computer is idle" isn't quite intuitive. For ex: If I'm playing audio, but not touching keyboard/mouse, is that idle or not? A better option might be to give an absolute range starting from 1min, but warn the user, if duration is set to less than Screen Saver time.

BTW, why's the max only 1 hour. On AC power, esp. with Desktops running on UPS, it's quite common to have sleep times around 4 hrs or so. I do this for my main desktop (running windows) as it's the file & print server for the laptops in use at home. The display shuts off in 10 mins, but the machine goes to sleep after 4 hrs.

11 minutes is not a mistake, and is not a trivial change to make (involves interaction with session idle settings -- see comment).

This has now been fixed in Karmic. now the settings can be set to as low as 1min also.

This is awesome, many thanks!

Just a comment as to what I was doing above:

the 100 papercuts project would like to keep track of their successes and fixes, and since this bug was rejected from their project we should keep it as "invalid"

Once the fix is in Karmic, we can say it is "fix released." If it is in an unreleased bzr branch or over on GNOME's git master, we use fix committed. Thanks everyone for helping out with this bug!

@Scott Howard:
I understand the released/commited , But David Seigel wants the papercuts fixes to be marked as "Fix Commited" , for now.

Also when i had marked this initial as confirmed , i felt it was a trivial fix, and David had overlooked this... hence i marked it fix commited. But discussed this with David and he feels we can leave it as invalid....

If you notice any other papercuts fixed , mark them as "Fix Comitted" only.