hibernate suspend works on CLI, not from GUI

I hope somebody can help…I’ve spent most of the day trying to fix this already!!

I got a new laptop and installed Opensuse 11.0 on it. The laptop is a Dell Studio. I am trying to get hibernate and suspend working from GUI programs, like kpowersave. After spending much of the day searching forums and google, I’ve learned this:

The following work perfectly from the command line (as root):
pm-hibernate
pm-suspend
s2ram -f

The following do NOT work as root OR user:
powersave -U
powersave -u
KDE or Gnome GUI programs don’t work

When I try powersave at the commandline, it just seems to hang until I hit Ctrl-C. The GUI programs have no result. The system continues running as if nothing happened.

My understanding is that the problem is related to HAL or PolicyKit but I don’t know how they work to try to debug them. The config files seem fine and it is a fresh install (with all updates installed).

If anyone has any suggestions, let me know! Your help is truly appreciated!

If ‘s2ram -f’ works from a root console, then try creating a file called ‘/etc/pm/config.d/config’ containing the string:

S2RAM_OPTS=“-f”

KPowersave should work ok then.

Thanks for your suggestions, but I’ve already tried that one. I do think your suggestions will help suspend work once the problem is solved. I believe that powersave has to work from the command line before kpowersave will work.

More Info:
I am reading through the kpowersave documentation. It says “it is advisable to set DEBUG to 7 or 15 to increase the verbosity of the powersaved and of the proxy scripts.” Does anybody know what “set DEBUG” means? Google hasn’t help me with this.

More Criteria Discovered:

-If I set kpowersave to NOT start on log in
→ then I can use powersave -U or powersave -u
→ this works repeatedly without problems
→ until I start kpowersave…then neither GUI or CLI work
→ powersave CLI does not work again until I log out/into KDE
(killing kpowersave does not make powersave CLI begin to work)

-If I set kpowersave to start on log in
-> Neither kpowersave GUI or powersave CLI work

Next I will try in Gnome.