First, please find the list of bugs so that you are sure the bug you are reporting isn't a duplicate bug that someone else has fixed.
If not present, then please create a new bug attaching all the information to this new bug.
Please do not email me bug reports, as the volume of email I get is already huge. Bugzilla lets me keep it all the information in one place, so I don't loose track!
When GNOME Power Manager doesn't work, there is lots that could be wrong. To help me diagnose the problem, please supply the following information:
for i in /sys/class/power_supply/*/*; do echo $i; cat $i; done
This will turn on verbose debugging for GNOME Power Manager.
killall gnome-power-manager gnome-power-manager --verbose
This will display your user settings for GNOME Power Manager.
gconftool-2 -R /apps/gnome-power-manager
I would really appreciate it if you could send me more information about the crash, specifically a backtrace with gdb.
You have to compile GNOME Power Manager from GIT to do this. Grab the latest from GIT, and open configure.ac, and uncomment the line below "Debugging switches" Run ./autogen.sh --prefix=/tmp as normal in the source directory. Compile it with "make", and then use "make install". After that in the same directory where you typed "make" run:
gdb ./gnome-power-manager
The GNU debugger (gdb) will start and put you at a prompt:
(gdb) _
Then type the following and crash the program / let it crash on it's own.
(gdb) run --verbose
You will be back in the gdb shell. Then type bt at the prompt and send me all the output that follows. This will tell me exactly what the program was doing when it crashed.
For more information, see the GNOME wiki page about getting stack traces. This link will also give you more information.