Mate-power-manager keeps crashing (how to keep it running / automatically restart?)

Question

Under Centos 7, mate-power-manager (from the EPEL repo) keeps crashing. When run manually from the command line, at the time of the crash it throws the error:

ERROR:gpm-kbd-backlight.c:342:gpm_kbd_backlight_on_dbus_signal: code should not be reached

I've found that it's an incompatibility with upower, and the workarounds suggested reduce the crashes, but don't eliminate it.

It has been fixed with version 1.18.1 However, that is not available in EPEL. I've tried building it myself, but keep getting prompted for sudo with

authentication is needed to run mate-power-backlight-helper

I really just want mate-power-manager to keep running (or automatically restart after a crash) so that I don't miss a critical battery alert.

Answer 1

For the sake of just having the power manager running, the simplest solution seems to be to use sudo to edit the file /etc/xdg/autostart/mate-power-manager.desktop and uncomment the last line:

X-MATE-AutoRestart=true

The crashes will still occur, but at least mate-power-manager will now automatically restart when that happens.

Answer 2

After some additional research, it turned out the best long-term thing to do was to re-open the GitHub issue for the mate-power-manager project. The previously-fixed bug was an outstanding issue in Centos 7 that they fixed pretty quickly once I did that. Very much appreciated!