Ubuntu Error: starting from Gnome-Power-Manager

Today when I started my computer (Ubuntu 8.04), I got a message in the notification area:

The configuration defaults for GNOME power manager is not installed correctly, please contact your computer administrator.

Good news is: I AM the computer administrator, so I don't need to bother anybody. Bad news is: I have no idea what to do.

Then I found I can't run Synaptic Package Manager from the menu. The reason is: gsudo is broken, so there's no way to input the admin password. All the admin tools are not able to load from menu. I figure out to run it from command line:

sudo ls *input password so that the password is saved in cache for a few minutes.
sudo synaptic *start the Synaptic Package Manager .
sudo update-manager *start the Update Manager.

The other problem is that the theme is modified as "clearlooks" from "human". The Close and Minimize button are not showing in each window. Of course, modifiy it from the System->Preference->Apparence is not doing anything useful.

Then, after Googling, I found several complains about the same problem, started from July 2008. None of the complains is solved. Most of the victims reinstall the whole system. Some people suggested by saying "reinstall the gnome-power-manager" or "reinstall the gnome-settings-daemon" or "fixed the broken package", and one suggestion is to run the memtest86 to make sure the memory chips are good-- I actually follow this suggestion to figure out the memory chips are not the source of the problem.

I actually found the "/apps/gnome-power-manager" folder in Configuration Editor is gone.


Using the Synaptic to reinstall the gnome-power-manager is not changing anything. The last method I adapted, before the notification disappreaed, is to download the source code of gnome-power-manager and rebuild it. It works!

Yes, it works. The annoying notification is gone, and the "/apps/gnome-power-manager" folder in Configuration Editor has some values. But the other problems exists: The theme, the gsudo. And sometimes I got this message:

(gksu:6779): GConf-CRITICAL **: gconf_value_free: assertion `value != NULL' failed

This is still an open problem.

Sept 24, 2008: I gave up. Now I'm using KDE. It is good.