xfce4-power-manager 0.6.0 beta1 released

[Ali Abdallah]

Kok, Auke wrote:
> Liviu Andronic wrote:
>   
>> On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 12:53 AM, Ali Abdallah <ali.slackware at gmail.com> wrote:
>>     
>>> I just released a beta1 version 0.6.0 of the Power Manager.
>>>
>>>       
>> http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/applications/xfce4-power-manager
>>
>> Liviu
>>     
>
> I haven't tested this yet but I wanted to provide some general insights on this as
> part of my job is to look over power management (I'm the current powertop
> maintainer for instance).
>
> reading on the goodies webpage:
>
> --This software is a power manager for the Xfce desktop, laptop users can set up a
> power profile for two different modes “on battery power” and “on ac power”,
> desktop users still can change DPMS settings and CPU frequency using the settings
> dialog. --
>
> these are all the wrong things, and you shouldn't write a power manager that works
> in this way at all.
>
> The notion that "on battery power" is something different as "on AC power" is
> bogus. Saving power needs to happen in both cases. It lowers your electrical bill,
> cooling needed (which results in even less power used overall in your home) and is
> good for the environment. Power saving does not stop when you plug in your computer.
>
> Likewise, the computer should always run in ondemand governor. Never ever does the
> user themselves need to select a different governor since the kernel knows best
> what speed is needed for the current workload. In my 5-second boot project, we
> showed that the computer starts up exactly in the same speed with both ondemand
> and performance governors. We should really not let the user make things worse,
> especially when the kernel does such a great job and knows best.
>
>
>   
I don't mean at all what you said, the manager starts up and set 
ondemand cpu governor as default (if it's not alreay), but it's up to 
the user to change it, on battery power it's a better idea to stick to 
powersave governor, so that's it.

> For instance, in the classical world you would have your screen become less bright
> when you unplug your power cable. But if you are sitting in a sunlit airport
> terminal or are showing your presentation to a colleague in a cafe, or are playing
> a movie on the couch at home or in an airplane, you'd want the brightness to be
> high so you can enjoy actually seeing the details on screen. So therefore it's the
> application running (movie player, presentation) or the environment (lots of
> peripheral light) that dictates the screen brightness, not the presence of AC power.
>
>   
You can always set what you want using your keyboard.
The lcd brightness support is mainly for the laptop that does this 
settings in software, some sony vaio models for example doesn't change 
the brightness if you press the brightness up and down keys, so here the 
manager can help.

> The same notion happens with screen blanking. Does it not stink to have to touch
> your mouse every 5 minutes in order to prevent the screen from blanking when you
> watch a movie?
>
> Now of course, a lot of this application-dependent code hasn't been written yet or
> the driver support is lacking. There's surely a lot of work to be done and I'm not
> saying that this needs to come from the Xfce goodies people (on the contrary).
>
> Having GUI accessible dpms settings of course is a nice thing. That in itself
> could be an application on it's own...
>
>
>   
I didn't see a GUI only made for DPMS settings, anyway xset can be very 
good here, in this power manager you can set the timeouts the way you like.

If you test it and/or you this there is something wrong with the web 
page, the application itself or something, please report to 
http://bugzilla.xfce.org

Regards,
Ali.

> Auke
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