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

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

KDE Tablet PC support

One of problems with Tablet PCs under Linux is lacking support for small, but very essential features as the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition provide. There are already drivers for machines with e.g. Wacom tablets or some Fujitsu Siemens (FSC) devices and also some applications as Xournal, Jarnal or xstroke which provide useful features.

On SUSE there is also support in SAX to configure Wacom and FSC devices and I already wrote a patch for HAL (v0.5.8/git) to detect Tablet PCs and set the needed Ports correct and automatically. There is also a patch for XDM to show xvkbd on login and a patch for KDE to show xvkbd on the unlock dialog from Lubos Lunak.

But until now one feature was missing: The user could rotate the screen via KRandr and also the Wacom driver support already rotation but there was no way to do this together because the Wacom driver did not support the XRandR extension. The user had to call xsetwacom to rotate also the input devices to use rotation. Thanks to Stephan Binner the user can now rotate the screen and the input devices together via KRandr and it work like a charm. You can find the patch here.

Tech Tags: KDE TabletPC

HAL patch collection (3)

Some time since I posted the last blog entry. So now the first message of the new year.

Here some new patches I send to the HAL mailing list which aren't included in the git repository because they are not approved (I think David Zeuthen is currently in Australia, so he is maybe not that often online.):

• two patches to cleanup the Linux LUKS scripts [1] and fix the password handling to prevent the bash from word splitting and path expanding [2]
• a patch to add support for IBM ACPI hotkey events, which allow HAL to send e.g. the sleep and s2disk/hibernate button event as currently already for other machines: here
• a patch which fixes the detection of libsmbios for the Dell backlight addon - the code of the addon need libsmbios >= 0.11.6 - by proof the library version: here
• a fix for set/get brightness on machines which supported by sonypi kernel module: here
• a fix support the old and the newer version of the omnibook kernel module, which try to find the max. supported levels of brightness: here

These patches are against current HAL git. As always: you can find all my current HAL patches here.

Tech Tags: HAL Patches

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