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GNOME Power Manager project gets underway

Submitted by Anonymous George on Thu, 2005-03-24 04:14. GNOME System Tools

GNOME Power Manager is a GNOME session daemon that acts as a policy agent on top of the Project Utopia stack, which includes the kernel, hotplug, udev, and HAL. GNOME Power Manager listens for HAL events and responds with user-configurable reactions. Currently it supports UPS's, laptop batteries and AC adaptors. Its goal is to be architecture neutral and free of polling and other hacks.

Linux power management on laptops sucks. Project Utopia is all about making things "Just Work" and that's how power-management should be.

The site can be found here with lots of screenshots.

There is a CVS repository available with the latest and greatest code.

Note: The project is at alpha status and at this stage I’m looking for preliminary feedback on initial concepts, and people’s views on how this should be done.

Supplying information instead of program code?

Submitted by Anonymous George on Thu, 2005-03-24 22:23.

The Linux kernels distributed with Fedora Core 2 (Linux kernel 2.4, I suppose) used to read my laptop's battery status and accurately reflect the switch between battery/plugged-in. No kernel distributed with FC3 (Linux kernel 2.6 series) does this correctly. As a result, in FC3 I have no idea how much power is in the battery when I run FC3 and the battstat applet is useless. I don't know if it's relevant, but in order to get any Linux kernel version to power down this laptop, I have to set acpi=force (force using ACPI).

I frame the description this way because it all seems like a kernel issue to me. And if the kernel can't read the laptop's state correctly, there's no way anything higher will behave properly (battery status apps, HAL, etc.).

I am, like most people, not a kernel hacker. But I am willing to help kernel hackers by sending them data about my machine. Is there a program I can run that will generate the data I should send about my machine?

I would like to see the battery power level in detail, shut down the machine and see the software issue the power down command at the right time (versus me powering down the machine manually).

Thanks for your help.

- J.B. Nicholson-Owens (jbn@forestfield.org)

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