KPowersave Tip of the Day

I've seen at SUSE Labs Conference and now at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), that people have trouble to disable Screensaver and Display Power Management Signaling (DPMS) on KDE while a presentation/talk.

Here now the "KPowersave Tip of the Day" for Linus Torvalds (which had some problems to find out how to disable the screensaver at the LPC) and all the other KDE users out there:

KPowersave has a 'Presentation' scheme which do everything for you (disable: screensaver, DPMS, autosuspend, autodimm). Simply activate it before starting your presentation:

• right click at the KPowersave icon
• select 'Set Active Scheme'
• select the 'Presentation' scheme
  

Tech Tags: KPowersave KDE Conference

KPowersave Test Cases

To improve the quality of KPowersave I've wrote some test cases for the most important functionality and features of KPowersave and added them to a test plan in the internal Novell Testopia system.

Since Testopia isn't available for external people I've added the same test cases to the SVN repository of KPowersave (see here) so that every interested person can follow the instructions and report bugs and regressions. You can get the test case also as a tar.bz2 package from ftp or as plain text files here.

All cases are about KPowersave running under KDE3. Every test run, against the latest KPowersave (SVN) version, and bugreport (with the number or name of the failed test case) would be appreciated.

Tech Tags: KPowersave

HAL: sysfs ACPI batteries fixed

With the recently released linux kernel v2.6.24 and if configured with ACPI_PROCFS_POWER and ACPI_SYSFS_POWER, you get now two ACPI battery interfaces in the system. One, as before, under /proc/acpi/battery/ and a new in the power_supply subsystem in the sysfs under /sys/class/power_supply/ . HAL listed both batteries, which was fixed by show the proc batteries only if there is no power_supply battery in the system [1]. Unfortunatly the sysfs battery was never updated (except on add/remove events of the AC adapter). This could lead, besides missing information updates, to a system crash on empty batteries if the userspace tools as e.g. KPowersave trusted these information. They never reached critical battery levels in this case.

I have now fixed this problem in HAL git master with several patches (last one was this), which also fix the power_supply battery handling in general (since it were several bug in the code). HAL poll now the power_supply ACPI batteries every 30 seconds as HAL already does for proc batteries. The code should work basicly, but I assume there are some corner cases left. Need to check the existing ACPI code for the proc batteries to find and port them. Maybe it make sense to split up the ACPI sysfs battery part from the existing power_supply handling to merge it into the existing ACPI code ... we will see.

I have added an updated HAL version for openSUSE factory (and for openSUSE 10.3 as testing package) to my OSBS HAL project repo and to the next Alpha2 of openSUSE 11.0. Fell free to test and report problems.

Tech Tags: HAL ACPI battery sysfs

KPowersave 0.7.3 released

Some days ago I released the next version of KPowersave (v0.7.3). Also if this is a package is marked on sf.net as 'unstable', which mean it's from the development tree, this is a really stable version.

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

• new feature autodimm, which allow to reduce the brightness of the display automatically if the user get inactive (after a defined time) and dimm up if the user get active again
• new dialog shown up 30 seconds before autosuspend call the suspend, to warn the user and allow chancel the suspend
  
• new dialog to show logfiles if a suspend/resume fail and allow the user to save the log (need to get enabled per distribution, depending on the suspend solution)
• added code to check if the current desktop session is active and handle usecases if the session get inactive (via ConsoleKit)
• KPowersave work with new PolicyKit/ConsoleKit/HAL combination and checks if the user is privileged (for HAL >= 0.5.10 and related PolicyKit versions)
• prepared to work also with HAL >= 0.5.10 (handle renamed policy names in HAL)
• release/aquire org.freedesktop.Policy.Power if the session get inactive/active to allow powersaved or other active KPowersave instances to handle powermanagement
• use now kdebug functions instead of own macros, added --dbg-trace option to allow trace function entry and leave points

The release contains also many smaller changes and lots of bugfixes and translation updates. For a complete list of changes, take a look at the package Changelog or the commit log which is part of the source.

You can download the source and rpms as always via kde-apps.org or directly via the sourceforge project page. On sf.net are besides the source tar.bz2 already packages for these distributions (for ix86 and x86_64) available: Mandriva 2007.1/2008, openSUSE 10.2 (also for ppc) and Fedora Core 6/7/8. The package is already part of the released openSUSE 10.3.

Tech Tags: KPowersave

KPowersave in openSUSE build service

Since some weeks I provide SVN snapshots of KPowersave via the openSUSE build service for openSUSE 10.2 and 10.3/factory. You can get the packages from my home project. Feel free to test and report bugs via openSUSE bugzilla (assign to: dkukawka_at_novell_dot_com).
If I find the time and muse I add also packages for other distributions (patches for the spec-file are welcome) sometime.

KPowersave Debian / (K)Ubuntu packages

Now are also updated packages (v0.7.2) of KPowersave for Debian via experimental available (see here). Thanks to Michael Biebl for packaging and maintain the package for Debian.

Also thanks to Luka Renko for update the Ubuntu/Kubuntu KPowersave package to v0.7.2. As it looks also many people would like to see KPowersave as default (see e.g. this discussion) on Kubuntu. Maybe Kubuntu can switch from the guidance-power-manager to KPowersave (since we use now HAL instead of powersave) as default under KDE ?!

Feel free to test the packages and report bugs to your distribution.

Tech Tags: KPowersave Packaging

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

KPowersave outlook to 0.7.2

Currently I work on the next KPowersave version 0.7.2. The most work is already done and the new configure GUI get finished for this version. Here two screenshots of the new dialog.

The first show the new schemes section which now allow to create new and delete existing schemes. I also included a new tab to config the CPU frequency policy for each scheme:

The second show the new 'General Settings' section which now include the already in 0.7.1 via the config file changeable options: battery levels and actions, button events and the default AC/battery scheme (click on the picture to show the animated gif and all new tabs).

I plan to release the new package (including many bugfixes) within the next days. A complete translation is currently only available in german. Feel free to checkout the translation files from here, to translate to your language and to send me the updated file. Any help would be really appreciated.

Tech Tags: KPowersave

KPowersave config tutorial

As wrote in my last post about the current KPowersave release 0.7.1 there are some settings which the user can't change at the moment via the configure dialog. Here now a small tutorial how to control this settings via the KPowersave config file.

You can control the settings for these options:

• battery warning levels
• actions for battery warning levels and lidclose
• default AC and battery scheme
• CPU frequency policy for each scheme

To change the config keys for these options you need to open in your home with a editor of your choise this file (if the file is not present, create the file): ~/.kde/share/config/kpowersaverc

KPowersave provide three different battery warning levels: warning, low and critical. To define the percentage (between 0 and 100) of battery fill for these levels you need to edit config keys in the section [General]. If the section is not there, simply add a line with [General] at top of the file and add/edit these keys there :

batteryWarning=12
batteryLow=7
batteryCritical=2

You can also define a action (currently only one per level) which is called if one of the battery warning levels reached. The available actions are:

• shutdown the machine (SHUTDOWN)
• suspend to disk (SUSPEND2DISK)
• suspend to ram (SUSPEND2RAM)
• change the CPU freqency policy to 'performance' (CPUFREQ_POWERSAVE) or 'dynamic' (CPUFREQ_DYNAMIC)
• change the brightness if supported by your hardware (BRIGHTNESS)

To define the actions for the battery warning levels you have to change this keys (also in the section [General]):

batteryWarningAction=
batteryLowAction=BRIGHTNESS
batteryCriticalAction=SHUTDOWN

The values in this example are the already defined defaults, so you don't need to add/change the keys if this is what you want. For the action BRIGHTNESS you need an additional key for each level to define the level (in percentage) of brightness to set:

batteryWarningActionValue=
batteryLowActionValue=
batteryCriticalActionValue=

You can use the same actions and values as for battery warning levels also for the event if the lid of your laptop get closed. To control the behavior you need to change these keys:

ActionOnLidClose=
ActionOnLidCloseValue=

To control which scheme KPowersave should use on battery or on AC you need to know the names of the available schemes. You can find them in this file: /opt/kde3/share/config/kpowersaverc . Currently there are (excluding the [default-scheme]) these schemes per default: Performance, Powersave, Presentation and Acoustic. To set the schemes you have to change these keys:

ac_scheme=Performance
battery_scheme=Powersave

At least you can change the CPU frequency for each scheme. For this you need, if not already there, for each a own section in the config file (a section starts with the name of the scheme withing '[ ]'). The available CPU frequency policies are: PERFORMANCE, POWERSAVE and DYNAMIC. Here a example for the performance scheme:

[Performance]
cpuFreqPolicy=DYNAMIC

If you canged all you want, you need to restart KPowersave to apply the changes.

Tags: KPowersave Tutorial

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!

Tags: KPowersave

KPowersave on the way to 0.7.0

Only some hours until deadline for openSUSE Beta2 and a new version of KPowersave, which no longer depends on the powersave daemon and use HAL instead.

In the last days I removed the complete powersave related code and replaced it with new classes and hardware abstraction. Today I finished the basic part and we have now a powersave independend version in SVN which runs. But this does not mean the new version work as planed ... there is enough work left.

Yesterday I added an pre-annoucement for the new 0.7.x development version at kde-apps.org planed for this week. And as you can see in the comments there are people which are not so happy about switch from powersave to HAL (as you can see in this post I'm not that happy too):

... going HAL is a real downer and ( at least to me ) it turns Kpowersave into just "another" solution, stripping it from what made it different ..

powersave was EXACTLY the way to go .. and to tell you the truth, knowing why Kpowersave is going HAL is what makes everything even worse. It makes me feel like mediocrity and disdain won once again.

And there is also this question in the comments here:

What are the benefits of changing from powersaved to HAL?

So, what are the reasons for change from powersave to HAL? As first: Since the powersave developer decided to kill the powersave daemon and integrate (the most of) the functions of the daemon into HAL and pm-utils, we have no choise. We have to use the new infrastructure or KPowersave die with the daemon. This was the main reason to rewrite KPowersave.

So what are the benefits?

• No dependency to the powersave daemon (the package is not in every distribution default).
• We can move the most of the scheme management from the daemon to KPowersave. This make KPowersave anymore flexible than before.
• We have now the chance to get KPowersave into the KDE SVN and maybe KPowersave could replace KLaptop as default KDE powermanagement solution.

And the disadvantages?

• We lose the great powersave daemon, but for more read this post.
  

Tags: KPowersave KDE Linux

KPowersave status

Today a short update about the current status of the KPowersave development for the next stable version running with HAL instead of the powersave daemon:

We have a new deadline for the first running base version on KPowersave. It's openSUSE 10.2 Beta2, which means I need to checkin the new package at least Monday the 06.11.2006 to get a running version into the release. In Beta1 KPowersave is not in the default selection because of problems with the connection to D-Bus. I had no time to take a look at this issue, so thanks to Timo Hoenig for the patch to fix the problem in the old and new upcomming versions.

Unfortunately I could not commit the fix (and work on KPowersave) because of problems with the SVN server of Novell Forge. The server is down since Friday (27.10.) without any previous announcement from the admins. This is very annoying for the users and really unprofessional from the admins of Novell Forge, also because the service is down the complete weekend. Very good for the deadline for Beta2 if you host a project there.

Nevertheless we finished the most of the work on the hardware information and abstraction part of KPowersave. Now we can start with integrate the new base classes into the applet/GUI.

Tags: KPowersave development

KPowersave development for next stable (0.8.x)

Today a (short) brief/information about the current planed and already started development for the new KPowersave development tree (0.7.x) and the next stable version (0.8.x):

Preamble

Since Powersave starts to die and the powermanagement tasks going into HAL we need to change KPowersave to use HAL instead of Powersave.

Only for the log: I don't like this step and for me is the concept to put _all_ (hardware information, powermanagement, mounting, partition, format ...) stuff into one daemon, (into this crappy HAL and only because some desktop developer are not able to write a UNIX like daemon for special tasks) a really stupid idea.

I liked the old powersave. This was a great piece of code which contains several man-years of knowledge about ACPI/APM and powermanagement and did a great job over the years. I'm not happy about losing it.

This changes mean at least also more trouble in KPowersave.

Table of contents:

1. HAL/Powersave basics
2. Replace Powersave
3. GUI
4. Testing
5. Documentation/Translation
6. Timeframe

(1) HAL/Powersave basics

Currently KPowersave use Powersave and libpower from powersave to get hardware information, to switch schemes, to set CPU Freq and to trigger suspend2*/standby.

In general we need to connect now directly to HAL to get a signal if something on hardware changed, if we want to avoid permanent polling e.g. for battery information via libpower. There are two possible ways: listen to HAL for changes and call libpower to fresh up device information or listen to HAL and collect all device information directly in KPowersave.

I would go the second way. This should reduce the overhead of the library (libpower currently (old version KPowersave currently depends on) provide several info we never need and miss some other info we need now). If we implement this directly in KPowersave we can cache the information and need only to update the changed values (e.g. we need only call hal for current battery percentage and only for this key and only for this special battery) which should reduce the overhead on DBUS and allow KPowersave a finer grained signal and information pool.

Needed work:

implement a new class to:

• hold connection to the HAL interface via DBUS (done)
• to provide a layer to libhal to get device info (done)
• add methods to find devices by capability and property (done)
• to provide a layer to call DBUS methodes on HAL/DBUS interface (done)

implement a class to collect and abstract:

• battery, ac, lid information (75% done, need to think about the battery stuff)
• info about suspend, brightness, CPU Freq (done, TODO: add support for PolicyKit information)
• add function to update the related info if something changed. (in progress, Danny/Frank)

(2) replace Powersave

To replace currently by powersave provided functionality we need to change several issues in KPowersave:

suspend2*/standby:

Old Powersave provided a interface to trigger suspend2*/standby and to check if the user is allowed to call this methodes. HAL provide currently only a abstraction of the kernel interface, which mean we can only say if the machine/kernel can suspend in general, but we can't say if:

• the user is allowed to call these methodes
• the machine is really suspendable (or if the machine is e.g. not able to suspend2ram and is blacklisted e.g. in s2ram).

Problems:

• I have currently no idea how we can fix this. Maybe via PolicyKit, but this is not sure because we don't know if this go really in SUSE 10.2 or if PolicyKit is mandatory for HAL upstrean in the future. This situation is really bad and the sideeffects are annoying for the user.
• HAL only support suspend2* and not standby atm upstream (on SUSE we have a patch for this).

battery alarm states:

Powersave currently provide the battery alarm states and the config at which point which state is reached. We need to move this to KPowersave and make it configurable only in general and not per scheme. We need to configure the three states and the related actions (e.g. warn user, suspend, shutdown)

Problems:

• Several different users can be connected to the system and every user can define different states and different actions which results in a chaos. This is at least again the same problem as with CPU freq via HAL and fighting clients. Maybe we add this to a admin mode dialog as e.g. in KControl and allow only a systemwide config, but this is only a solution for KDE. (evaluate: discussion started by Holger at: g-p-m Mailing list)

CPU Frequency Policy:

Since CPUFreq settings are moved from powersave to HAL, we need also to replace the current settings in KPowersave. There are two issues:

• make the currently existing different CPUFreq Policies configurable
• make them configurable per scheme

Problems:

• Fighting Clients and other tools (see above).

Schemes:

Powersave currently provide some schemes (powersave, performance, presentation and acoustic), two of them are automatically switched if the AC plug is removed/inserted. We need to implement _real_ schemes in KPowersave. We have currently schemes in KPowersave (with brightness, screensaver, DPMS, autosuspend settings and so on), but we need to make them configurable. This mean we need this stuff:

• create new/remove/edit for current schemes
• make configurable default schemes for AC online/offline (and maybe other events as e.g. lidclose or if detectable adding a beamer to the machine for presentation scheme)
• per scheme CPU Frequency settings (see above)
• per scheme disk settings

Problems:

• There is currently no way to set the harddisk settings, but we need this on some machines which change the settings e.g. via the BIOS on suspend or if the AC plug is removed (which maybe increase Load_Cycle_Count and reduce lifetime of the disk).
• Fighting clients with different settings.

(3) GUI:

Based on the changes from (2) we need to update the configuration dialog to make all the settings configureable for the user. As a first step we don't need to implement this (first finish the basic stuff), we can do the config via the config file. Tasks to do:

• create/remove schemes, as first new schemes with a default config (first steps done). Later we can maybe add a wizard for inexperienced users
• CPU Freq stuff (per scheme, and per policy)
• AC state and actions (global settings)
• Battery states (global settings)

(4) Testing

Provide first working version as always on sf.net/freshmeat and kde-apps.org, send a mail to opensuse ML.

(5) Documentation/Translation

Need to extend, update and translate the documentation. We need also some new translations.

(6) Timeframe

A first stable running version - without not needed stuff from (3) - until openSUSE Beta1/2/final. With the new stable and without dependecy to powersave we can think about push KPowersave into KDE SVN as default KDE powermanagement applet.

You can find all already done changes in the KPowersave SVN at trunk.

Tags: kpowersave

KPowersave update v0.6.2 released

Sunday I released the a new update for the stable tree of KPowersave with version number 0.6.2 and also a new powersave version (v0.12.20) to sf.net. This release fixes more than eight bugs. Here the most important changes:

• KPowersave depends now on powersave >= 0.12.18
• fixed bugs:
• sf.net #1483392/ SUSE #177792: set changes for autosuspend state via DCOP back to the applet menu, added DCOP functions to set the current scheme, the current CPUFreq policy and to open/close the detailed dialog
• sf.net #1483392/ SUSE #177788,180000: added workaround to fix two bugs in the DPMS- and Screensaver extension of X, related to autosuspend and detect user inactivity (DPMS timeouts are abstracted from current idle time, but shouldn't / DPMS timeouts are currently additive but shouldn't). This fix problems with autosuspend if the timeout is longer than the DPMS timeouts.
• SUSE #168619: changed errorhandling if HAL, DBUS or the powersave daemon is not running or if the user has not the needed rights to access the powersave daemon via DBUS. Added new errormessages and translations.
  
• SUSE #182515: Changed configure dialog to respect rules for DPMS timeouts
• SUSE #176782: patch from Timo Hönig to allow (if supported and enabled in the scheme) change brighness via mousewheel over the applet icon.
  
• SUSE (SLED) #183745: fixed detection of SUSE Linux/SLES/SLED and added Fixed bugzilla link for SLED/SLES configure option to force SLES/SLED as distro with --enable-suse-sles.
• SUSE #184076: fixed wrong command to start dbus daemon in errormessage.
  
• added additional check before autosuspend if this was disabled via applet
• added new configure check to detect Ubuntu/Kubuntu
• changed link to Ubuntu bugzilla to launchpad.net and use now the same link for applet menu entry "Report a bug ..." if compiled for Ubuntu/Kubuntu
• updated default blacklist for autosuspend with gmplayer,kaffeine,xine,mencoder
• updated translation: cs,de,es,fi,fr,hu,it,km,pl,pt_BR,zh_CN,zh_TW
• updated (cs) and fixed translation of eventsrc for KNotify
• fixed and updated code documentation

Packages are, as always, available on the sourceforge project page for SUSE Linux 10.0, FC4/5, Mandriva and Slackware and via links on kde-apps.org for other distributions (note: the new version is maybe not available for all of them at the moment) including Debian, K/Ubuntu, Arch Linx, Gentoo or ALT Linux.

And again ... more distributions

KPowersave is now among SUSE Linux, Debian, K/Ubuntu, Mandriva, Slackware, ALT Linux, Arch Linux, Fedora Core 4/5 and Gentoo available on two additional distributions.

On FoX Desktop 1.0 Professional (a Fedora based KDE distribution) KPowersave and powersave are the default powermanagement solution (see Release Notes).

KPowersave (and also powersave) is now available in the development tree of PLD Linux. You can download the package from the 3.0 tree of the ftp server. PLD Linux is also a former RedHat based polish distribution.

KPowersave stable update v0.6.1 released

Yesterday (5/25/2006) I released the first update for the current stable tree of KPowersave. Packages are, as always, available on the sourceforge project page for SUSE Linux 10.0, FC4/5, Mandriva and Slackware and via links on kde-apps.org for other distributions including Debian, K/Ubuntu, Arch Linx, Gentoo or ALT Linux.

This release fixes some UTF-8 [bug #165462] and translation [bug #168838] issues in the KNotify dialog and fixes the applet tooltip and displayed remaining battery time on APM machines (incl. code cleanup) [bug #167296]. This version also fix the detailed dialog for multiprocessor/-core machines without CPUFreq or throttling support and offline CPUs/Cores. Other updates: translation updates (fi, km, pl) including desktop files and eventsrc (ru from Anton Farygin ), updated README and an additional configure check for needed dbus-qt3-devel.

For Fedora, it is strongly recommended to update powersave to 0.12.17 (powersave is added automatically to boot). For all other distributions, updating powersave is also recommended.

New packages ... more distributions

Some new messages about powersave and KPowersave: I added packages for Fedora Core 5 to the sourceforge project website. It was again a pain to create the new rpms. I don't know if really someone develop KDE applications on FC5, but if I need to compile a own dbus-qt3 and dbus-qt3-devel package - only because there is no rpm available and the related section in the specfile is out-commented - something is wrong with this distribution. Btw. Because of this I added also the needed dbus-qt3 rpms here. If you try to install and use KPowersave on FC5 you need at least the dbus-qt3 package. Unfortunately if have no experiences with SELinux and also the guys on the fedora selinux irc-channel were not very helpful. Hence you need to disable selinux support or at least the rule for acpi(d) on FC5. Patches for powersave are welcome.

Since powersave supports s2ram, I also added a suspend package (which include s2ram) for SUSE Linux 10.0 to sf.net. You also need to update pciutils to version 2.2.1, packages are available on the same download page.

Finally: powersave and KPowersave are now also available for Arch Linux. You can find the PKGBUILD powersave packages in the unstable tree and the KPowersave PKGBUILD here.

KPowersave 0.6.0 (stable) released

Monday I released the new stable KPowersave, version 0.6.0. The release contains several fixes for the processor information in the detailed dialog (e.g. for multiprocessor machines with throttling support), fixes for the battery infos in the tooltip, a fix from Michael Biebl for events after autosuspend, fixed errorhandling for call YaST power-management module and fixed the timeout for connection to powersave on startup to avoid problems with slow machines and autosuspend. I reduced the size of the package by optimize the included png-files and added a german version of the handbook. Also included: translation updates, changed links for report bugs from the applet menu if the installation is a SUSE/SLES/SLED, added support for lock screen with gnome-screensaver and added fake a key event after resume if the screen was locked to get the unlock dialog automatically. For all changes since the last stable version and the release news, read here.

Thanks to all people which helped to develop KPowersave and make the hole project successful with code, patches, testing all the unstable versions, reported bugs, their ideas and all the spend time. Special thanks to Holger Macht, Stefan Seyfried, Michael Biebl and Daniel Gollub.

You can download KPowersave for SUSE 10.0 (for 10.1 from factory repository or from the CD/DVD), Fedora Core 4 and Mandriva from the sourceforge project page. You can find links to download packages for e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Gentoo and Alt Linux on the kde-apps.org KPowersave page.

Testing (K)powersave on Kubuntu

The Kubuntu LaptopTestingTeam announced a help request for testing KPowersave/powersave on the current Kubuntu Dapper test release (Dapper Flight 5/6). The tester should test if KPowersave work better than the current default solution klaptop and document the results on a wiki page.

As I taked a look at the page some days ago, I could only found three reports. Hence I started testing Kubuntu here on several laptops from the Mobile Devices team at SUSE and reported the results back to the wiki. After eleven machines I can say two different things:

1. klaptop sucks! (it's not really maintained anymore, it hangs up in the most cases if you try to trigger suspend to ram ... )
2. on all tested laptops it works better with KPowersave/powersave than with klaptop
   

I hope the tests help to get KPowersave on the upcomming Kubuntu release - it's definitely the better solution. And if they maybe also integrate the s2ram tool, as we do on SUSE, more laptops should work out of the box.

Feel free to install Kubuntu Dapper Flight 6 on a small partition on your latop and run the requested tests to support the powersave project. All test reports would be really appreciated!