GNOME Power Manager project gets underway

Well, I've been talking to different people about this one - system level DBUS can provide the interface (maybe...) and system level gconf (which is pretty new) can provide the backing store, but you are right - we do need a lower level daemon to handle the logout/pre-login case. I'm open to ideas on this one, at the moment I'm working on the session daemon because I want to establish what users "want" to do with the UI, which will hopefully self define the interface with the lower level daemon - the code is still at 0.0.2, it's very much in flux. Email me if you have any more ideas on what to do here. Thanks.

Richard.

It can't be in the kernel, userspace policy does not belong in an abstracted kernel interface. It would never get past the kernel developers.

As for the abstraction, it's needed because the linux kernel does not provide a standardised interface for the different power management systems in use, e.g. apm uses /dev/apm and acpi uses /proc/acpi/* - standardising these and breaking all userspace compatability would be a *bad* thing.

If you want to suggest a better name, then please do so, I'm open for suggestions; as for gconf, I didn't want to re-invent the wheel with config files and xml and the like, gconf(like it or not) provides a standard interface that makes it easy to program applications. Anyway, the main system interface is DBUS, only the session preferences are currently stored in gconf, not the machine state.

I'm not a college dropout. I'm a university student interested in helping the Linux community, and have the support of lots of professionals in Linux.

If you think we are over-designing the interface, then please join the mailing list, and share your views, but please provide an alternative with a workable solution.

Richard Hughes

One of the major hurdles for me getting Linux on my girlfriends laptop was power management; she expects the lid to close and it to suspend, and if she just walks away and leaves it on, for it to automatically hibernate - like windows does. Mucking around with acpid and bolting on a frontend wasn't an option for me. I wanted to do things properly.

On my server, I have a UPS that I have to configure using some acpd type daemon that wasn't user friendly, and certainly didn't "Just Work" Another thing that it could support.

Wireless mice have batteries. Windows tells you how much charge you have left, so should GNOME. Another thing.

Hopefully I can address some of these issues.

Richard.

So, the point is? That it shouldn't be done? That you prefer using Windows? That you don't know why the hell you're posting in a linux-centric site?

People nowadays...

Have you tried the latest 2.6.11 from rawhide? Seems to be a bit better at the whole ACPI thing. Email me the make and model of your laptop (and the output of dmesg) and I'll see what I can find out for you.

Richard.

It's quite simple. G-p-m get notified of a device with a new capability of "battery", it queries the charge level, and the max charge level, and works out a percentage (if not already provided by HAL) To decide of the icon, it queries the battery.type parameter and compares it to a list of known strings.

I'm updating the code at the moment to include a system dbus daemon, and make g-p-m a lot simpler (so that it's just a dumb session daemon) and maybe making g-p-m display an applet rather than the notification area. See the website, because I tend to update it every few days.

Richard.

http://gnome-power.sourceforge.net/images/gpm-taskbar.png

if the device has capability battery, the standard values battery.charge_level.current and battery.charge.level.design are always present, so we can use these to work out the percentage charge. Email me if you need more info. Richard.

Ohh yes, already supported :-) Wireless mice and keyboard support is already in place. If HAL supports the interface, it's trivial to add support (as in create new icon, define new type in header file) in GNOME Power Manager.

http://gnome-power.sourceforge.net/images/mouse-all.png

Thanks.

Thanks! The UPS support will need HAL from CVS as there's a few bugs I've found in the 0.50 release that have only just been fixed in CVS.

Also, you'll get the preferences dialogue if you get GNOME Power Manager from CVS, but it doesn't do much at the moment.

If you launch the preferences program (gnome-power-preferences) then insert your UPS, you'll find that the UPS configuation options appear after a few seconds automatically. Similar if you add a new laptop battery :-)

Richard.

Not sure. Maybe. At the moment it's just "power" stuff but I see where you are coming from. I think this is what OSX does.