At the Ubuntu Dev Summit in Paris, we decided
that Kubunt needs its own powermanagement applet. We started designing it right there, and I
even wrote some backend code. Due to a vacation and other obligations, I wasn’t able to do much work
on it last month, but I picked it up again, and it’s progressing nicely — to the point where I’m
starting to use it myself. Jonathan had done some nice work on it, and I took it over again. Since
the initial test release, it has seen quite some improvements:
- Part of the initial code from Jonathan Riddell
- Beautiful icons, thanks to Ken Wimer
- Lots of improvements in the user interface, thanks to \el
- Display of cpu frequency (including multi cpu and cpu hotplugging support)
- Largely refactored code so it’s actually fun to work
with - And of course a bunch of bugfixes
Besides battery and CPU status reporting, you can configure the power manager to switch to a
lower power state by for example dimming the display a bit, and to perform various actions when the
power cable is plugged, unplugged, when the lid is closed and when the battery is nearly empty.
Special thanks go out to Jonathan Riddel and Luka Renko for testing it.
There’s a number of issues with power-manager at the moment, however. First, PyQt (and thus
PyKDE) can not ‘listen’ to dbus since the Qt event loop is not yet supported in the python dbus
bindings. We currently work around this by polling every 5 seconds. John “J5” Palmieri will be at
aKademy, so we might discuss a better solution in Dublin at the end of this month.
Second, power-manager does not support multiple batteries currently. I cannot work on that part
since I do not have two batteries I can use in my notebook at the same time. Patches for this are
welcome, of course. I someone wants to lend me a Thinkpad Ultrabay Slim battery, that’d also be
great (bring one to aKademy, if you’re there).
I’d like to get more feedback now, please download the
test package (packaged for Edgy, it should work well also on Dapper but you might need to force
install it) and report back, either email me directly,
or add your feedback to the Wiki. You can also get the code
from KDE’s subversion
repository.