KPowersave Mandriva/FC 6 packages

Today/yesterday I released new packages of KPowersave v0.7.2 for Mandriva 2007.1 and Fedora Core 6 on SourceForge.net. You can download the RPMs and SRPMS for ix86 and x86_64 from the project home page. Report bugs for these distributions as always via sf.net bugzilla or the powersave-users mailing list.

Tech Tags: KPowersave, Mandriva, Fedora

KPowersave 0.7.2 released

This weekend I release the new KPowersave version 0.7.2. from the development tree. This release is really a major step to the next stable version/tree 0.8.x. As first: forget the tutorial I wrote for v0.7.1 to manually change the settings of KPowersave - you don't need it anymore. You can now change all settings via the new updated configure dialog.

Here a list of the major changes since the last release:

• extended/updated configure dialog to provide this functionality:
• schemes settings:
• add new and delete existing (no default) schemes
• define a CPU Frequency policy for each scheme
• general settings:
• define battery warning levels and actions if a level reached as e.g. Suspend to disk, Shutdown or change the brightness
• configure actions for button events (Power/Lid/Suspend/Sleep)
• define the default AC and battery schemes
• show now the power consumption of the battery in the detailed info dialog if discharging
• umount external media before suspend (need a patch of the KDE media manager) to avoid data loss and remount on resume
• reset the CPU Freq settings on resume to avoid different CPU governors on multicore /CPU machines
• call now SetCPUFreqConsiderNice(), SetCPUFreqPerformance() on dynamic CPU Freq policy (as poweruser setting only changeable via config file) and also SetPowerSave() with true on battery and false otherwise
• support also conservative governor as DYNAMIC fallback
• fixed brightness handling in the configure dialog if not activated
• removed accelerator tags from i18n() strings. KDE handle this by itself.
• Improved config GUI to be better accessible via keyboard.
• code and code documentation cleanups and updates
  

I also fixed many bugs since the last version for more information read the release news. Due to the changes in the config GUI and the removed accelerator tags the most translations are currently not up-to-date (full translated: de, da, tr, zh_CN and zh_TW). Thanks to the following people for sending updates for their languages: Stefan Skotte (danish), S.Çağlar Onur (turkish) and Zhengpeng Hou (chinese). Any help on update translations would be really appreciated.

You can download the source and rpms as always via kde-apps.org or directly via the sourceforge project page. Currently are only rpms for openSUSE 10.2 available, other distributions will follows in the next days.

Tech Tags: KPowersave

Linus vs. GNOME

Do you remember the little flamewar between Linus Torvalds and GNOME December 2005 as he "encouraged people to switch to KDE" and called GNOME developer "interface nazis"?

Now the continuation: Linus wrote and submitted some patches for GNOME to change the behavior as he like it. You can follow the discussion on the Desktop Architects mailing list and get information about the patches here.

Here two quotes from one of Linus mails:

So let's see what happens to my patches. I guarantee you that they actually improve the code (not just add a feature). I also guarantee that they actually make things *more* logical rather than less (with my patches, double-clicking on the title bar isn't a special event: it's configurable along with right- and middle-clicking, and with the exact same syntax for all).

Now the question is, will people take the patches, or will they keep their heads up their arses and claim that configurability is bad, even when it makes things more logical, and code more readable.

IMO he is battlesome as always, but by sending patches also more constructive ;-)

Tech Tags: GNOME Linus