Laptop mode fails to start without saying why

same here with gutsy, would be nice if it would say why it does not start.

Some more verbosity or documentation seems to be needed, so that users don't have to reverse-engineer a whole chain of scripts and files to get it going.

I filed a patch for the missing "sudo update-rc.d laptop-mode defaults 99" in bug #127273.

Anyway, rumours go that laptop-mode-tools is going to be ditched from Gutsy...

Also
/etc/init.d/laptop-mode status
fails to report anything. It just returns silently.

This and the original issue are due to a test for ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE in line 32 in /etc/init.d./laptop-mode , which happens too early.
Rather this test should only occur in the start) and restart) cases, IMHO.

Oh, and I think that Bug #80979 is _not_ a duplicate of this bug, because this bug is fixed if ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE is true, Bug #80979 ist not.

The point is that the /etc/init.d script is not meant to be a way to start and stop the "laptop mode". When AC adapters are (un)plugged etc, the /usr/sbin/laptop_mode script is run and turns on/off the mode (and adjusts settings) accordingly (only if laptop mode is enabled by the /var/run/laptop-mode-enabled flag). The init script is a hook to make sure this check is done also at boot, since the adapter can have been (un)plugged while the machine was off.

Additionally, it first creates the /var/run/laptop-mode-enabled flag at boot (if you have set ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE in /etc/default/acpi-support). At shutdown the init script clears this flag, so that any later (un)plugging won't trigger any reconfigurations (even if ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE is still true in the config file).

IMOH "/etc/init.d/laptop-mode status" should not say if laptop mode is currently on (we have /usr/sbin/laptop_mode status for this) but it should report whether laptop mode is enabled (by looking at the /var/run flag).

This is trivially easy, just give the user some hints as to why this isn't enabled by default rather than silently fail. Also, perhaps this should be enabled for the netbook-remix variant, since these all use more modern hardware?

Change this in /etc/init.d/laptop-mode:
# FIXME: this shouldn't be configured there
if [ -f /etc/default/acpi-support ]; then
       . /etc/default/acpi-support;
fi

to this:
# FIXME: this shouldn't be configured there
if [ -f /etc/default/acpi-support ]; then
       . /etc/default/acpi-support;
        echo "You need to set ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true in /etc/default/acpi-support"
fi

You have my support on this, but the message should not be shown if it's actually enabled.

# FIXME: this shouldn't be configured there
if [ -f /etc/default/acpi-support ]; then
    . /etc/default/acpi-support;
    if ! $ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE; then
        echo "You need to set ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true in /etc/default/acpi-support"
    fi
fi

On second thought the right place to put the message is where the test for that is now:

if [ x$ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE = xfalse ]; then
       echo "You need to set ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true in /etc/default/acpi-support"
       exit 0;
fi