Date: Sunday, December 20, 2015 22:15:49 +0000 From: Nux! nux@li.nux.ro
From: "Chris Olson" chris_e_olson@yahoo.com Sent: Sunday, 20 December, 2015 21:05:53
Recent power management discussions plugged into one of our current frustrations, namely the interaction of the screen lock and power-save features on Intel/CentOS 6 platforms. We certainly would not have guessed that locking the screen would inhibit going into the power-save mode, but it sure seems to do exactly that on some of our test platforms.
If one leaves the desktop idle for the timeout period, the computer sleeps. If one locks the screen and then leaves the machine idle, the computer does not sleep. We were hoping that this "feature" was isolated to just our older Dell desktop machine hardware and firmware, but it appears elsewhere as well.
Possibly more interesting is that most of our systems were loaded with CentOS 6.X almost two years ago and have been updated at least weekly ever since. This new power-save scenario has appeared just within the last three weeks,and our investigations have not discovered the cause ora solution.
I assume you have double-checked Gnome's power management preferences and they are what you'd expect, right?
Power management is controlled by the window manager (which you didn't indicate). So, assuming gnome, you should look for recent updates to "gnome-power-manager" - check your yum.log for updates in the timeframe where this issue started. Make certain that you have the most recent (2.28.3-7.el6_4) installed. You might try a "yum downgrade" on that package to see if that fixes things. [I currently only have servers on centos-6, so no power managers, so can't look at things easily.]
For the record, on centos-7 -- both mate and gnome -- the power manager acts as expected (shutting down/suspending) the machine on the idle timer when the screen is locked.