GNOME Power Manager 2.17.3 review

GNOME Power Manager gets all information from HAL using information from org.freedesktop.Hal

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Richard Hughes

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GNOME Power Manager gets all information from HAL using information from org.freedesktop.Hal. GNOME Power Manager does not do independent probing for data, it relies on HAL, in this way it can stay very lightweight and uncomplicated. GNOME Power Manager goal is to be architecture neutral and free of polling and other hacks.

Power management in Linux sucks. Depending if you are running a PPC or i386 PC the different power management facilities are vastly different. To get your machine to suspend on lid press is already possible, but is difficult to know what config files to modify.

To get your LCD screen brightness set to 50% when you remove the AC Adapter of your laptop is probably possible with a clever little Perl script, but is not something that comes ready configured on a standard Linux distro.

Any of these things need the user to become the super-user to do the action. This needs to change before Linux is accepted as a contender for the corporate desktop.

Here are some key features of "GNOME Power Manager":
Laptop batteries
AC Adapters
APC UPS's
SynCE PDA's
Logitech Wireless Mice
Logitech Wireless Keyboards

GNOME Power Manager owns the session D-BUS service net.sf.GnomePower and runs a session daemon (i.e. once per logged in user) and optionally displays battery status and low battery notifications.

The session daemon is very resource friendly. Other than the initial coldplug, it uses internal caching for all the power devices, so no additional lookups are needed for each update event. It will only update the displayed icon on a powerState change, but will update the tooltip on every percentage change. It should use *very little* CPU and memory.

Requirements:
hal (0.5/CVS better)
dbus (0.30)
libnotify (0.0.1)