[ale] xfce4-power-manager works only as root

[David A. De Graaf]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 12:12:30AM -0400, Ted W. wrote:
> Hello from someone new to ALE, (really enjoyed the Drupal presentation)
> 
> I'll try to make this brief. I have installed Slackware 13.37 on an old 
> IBM laptop (new to me). I've installed Fluxbox as the window manager and 
> am attempting to use the xfce4-power-manager to try and manage the 
> battery consumption a bit. The trouble is that the drop-down menus to 
> change the options for things such as the lid button action and critical 
> battery action are grayed out unless I run the application as root. 
> Based on my searches I've determined it's likely an issue with policy 
> kit or maybe hal but I'm unfamiliar with where to go from there. Any 
> solutions or ideas to get me going in the right direction would be 
> greatly appreciated.

I struggled with getting Fedora 15 and xfce4 to work properly, and
after many days of Googling came upon an obscure solution.
Add this line to your ~/.xinitrc file:
  ck-launch-session dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session startxfce4
and then use startx instead of startxfce4 to initiate X.

I don't understand how or why this works.  The need to do it is
clearly a bug (BZ 722703).

This has a side benefit of somehow persuading that massive pile of poo
called  "pam"  that I should actually be allowed to edit my NetworkManager
connections and to edit my PowerManager settings.

It also magically restores the Hibernate and Suspend 'buttons' to the
PowerManager applet, and restores the Shutdown, Suspend, and Hibernate
buttons to the Logout icon, all of which were either absent or greyed out.

It also restores the proper definition of the DISPLAY variable in root
windows, allowing gui config programs (system-config-*) to work.


One other thing.  Once you have the Suspend button restored, you'll
probably want to have suspend actually work.  On my Asus N10 netbook,
pm-suspend started properly, but ended with a hung netbook, with the
CAPSLOCK LED flashing.  Only a power-cycle would recover it.

This was eventually traced to presence of VirtualBox-4.1.
Upon downgrading to VirtualBox-4.0, suspend is working correctly.

-- 
        David A. De Graaf    DATIX, Inc.    Hendersonville, NC
        dad at datix.us         www.datix.us


Cats!  The other white meat!