[Goodies-dev] proposal for xfce4-power-plugin

[Zach Carter]

On Saturday 23 June 2007 11:53:58 am Nick Schermer wrote:
> I don't really see why you want all this in a front end. I mean kernel
> governors with laptop mode can do almost anything with profiles and
> suspend can be triggered with a simple launcher or by laptop-mode.
> Power related stuff is (imho) really laptop specific and heavily
> depends on permissions, it just won't be a user friendly plugin that
> you add to your panel and control your entire laptop.
> You could create a plugin for this that uses hal (which can change
> governors, suspend and hibernate), that will at least make _your_ live
> much easier. But that last time I tried suspend from hal my laptop
> crashed, so that isn't perfect either...

Hmm.   I guess my thinking was this.  I want to improve my programming skills
by writing a plugin, and this is the only thing I could come up with that seemed
useful to me, and the added bonus was that it might help people conserve
energy.   Sure, I could probably implement all this myself with other tools, 
but the idea was to make it very user friendly so that other people wouldn't 
have to do lots of research to make it work.   The "pm-utils" package actually
interfaces with hal, and it seems to have builtin quirk codes for various laptop
models.  It also has the permissions issues worked out.   I would actually like to 
encourage people to save energy not just with laptops, but with their desktop 
PC as well.   There is some positive movement within the Linux community to 
improve and standardize power-saving features overall:

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2192333/green-linux-attack-power

-Zach