How to fix broken power management in Xubuntu 15.10 (16.04)

As we know Ubuntu has switched to the new "shiny" init system called systemd since the release 15.04. But the integration of that new init system isn't yet completely finished because some things aren't working as before the switch. Power management that utilized pm-utils previously is completely broken for example and no alternative solution is offered. In this article I'll explain how to restore pm-utils's old behaviour as a temporary workaround that can be used until a new and of course better official solution will be implemented.

Using the i3 tiling window manager with XFCE services

Since around a year or two I've been using i3 tiling window manager together with the xfce4 services as my desktop environment and I'm quite content with the result. The i3-wm can be installed on top of the xfce4 DE without any package conflicts. Such a combination allows to have both DE at the same time and share common settings and applications between them.

I can't remember exactly why I have chosen the i3-wm as my window manager but maybe it's because I have read that i3-wm has vim style movement keyboard shortcuts. As far as I'm a vim user I decided to 'take it for a spin'.

Minimal Xubuntu 14.04 LTS installation

I have previously described the process of minimal Xubuntu Desktop installation with versions 13.04 and 13.10. Now it's time to install Xubuntu 14.04 LTS!

Note: There's already a newer article – Xubuntu 16.04 LTS minimal installation

Minimal Xubuntu 13.10 Desktop installation

I have performed a clean install of the newest Xubuntu distribution and I like the result. They have reacted to the bug reports I posted and fixed dependencies to the bloatware and spying packages that were not possible to avoid during Xubuntu 13.04 installation. I have also spent some time trying to figure out the minimum set of packages for the network-manager to work. Here's the installation procedure:

Minimal Xubuntu Desktop installation

 

Edit: I strongly recommend to continue with the Xubuntu 13.10 installation because many steps described here are obsolete.

I spent a day building a minimum Xubuntu installation to avoid bloat-ware installed by default. I was installing Xubuntu on a small 16GB SSD that was used previously as an ExpressCache drive on Windows 7 and that's why I wanted to install minimum set of software for the Desktop to work.

As the basis for the system I've chosen Ubuntu 13.04 mini.iso. My first attempt was to install Debian Sid branch but software there is already outdated! And installing new software from experimental branch is not possible as apt-get would completely destroy installed Sid system.

Using of the xfce4-messenger-plugin

I was looking for a way to display an icon on a xfce desktop panel on some event. One possible solution is to use the xfce4-messenger-plugin. The plugin listens to messages on the D-Bus and displays them in a pop-up window or in the panel. Additionally it can display an icon if the message sent is prefixed with a identifier.