Thursday, November 23, 2006

KPowersave 0.7.1 released

Monday I released the first offical (v0.7.0 was only for openSUSE 10.2) release from the new development tree of KPowersave. With this release KPowersave depends no longer on the powersave daemon (sadly!) and use HAL (>= 0.5.8.1) instead to get hardware information and to trigger suspend or set brightness and the CPU frequency policies.

Also if KPowersave depend no longer on powersave, I would recommend to use the new powersave daemon furthermore. The daemon can, if there is no program that claim org.freedesktop.Policy.Power on the D-Bus system bus, handle system powermanagement without do crazy things like start a applet in KDM or GDM. If KPowersave start up the daemon stop automatically to handle powermanagement policy and KPowersave applet can force (if allowed) the user specific settings.

With this release KPowersave handle the different schemes and battery/lid actions independently. This include this parts:
  • definable battery warning levels (warning, low, critical)
  • definable actions for each battery warning level (e.g. suspend, change brightness, set a special CPU frequency policy or shutdown the machine)
  • definable actions if the lid get closed (same as for batteries)
  • set CPU frequency policy for each scheme
  • define AC and battery schemes
Currently the user can't change these settings via the config dialog in KPowersave, I concentrated for this release on reproduce the former functionality of KPowersave together with the old powersave daemon. A tutorial to change the settings in the config file follow as soon as possible. Extend the config dialog is one of the todos for the next releases.

I also fixed the KDE screensaver and DPMS handling to reduce/avoid interfer with the KDE user settings (e.g. if KPowersave exit). There is a KDE patch, from Dirk Müller (Thanks!), available to check if KPowersave already handle DPMS settings and call the KPowersave config dialog instead of the KControl dialog.

You can download KPowersave from kde-apps.org or directly from the sourceforge project page. This version is included in openSUSE 10.2. Feel free to test the package. Bugreports (for openSUSE to the Novell bugzilla, for other distros to the powersave-devel mailinglist) are really appreciated!
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