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GNOME Power Manager project gets underway

GNOME System Tools
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.

Only in a GNOME session?

This looks great. But what happens outside a GNOME session? Will you have to configure everything again on a lower level to make power management work then -- so your battery does not run out just because you logged out before walking away from your computer? What if there are two GNOME sessions at once?

Wouldn't it be better to have a system level daemon that is just configured through the GNOME interface? It could then apply different policies depending on which users are logged in, if you are at the GDM login screen or otherwise.