KubuntuPowerManagement

Revision 8 as of 2006-06-20 16:10:06

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Summary

Write a power management tool for KDE based on HAL.

Rationale

The existing klaptopdaemon uses obsolete technologies and is hard to maintain. The alternative kpowersave duplicates a lot of the power management support included in Ubuntu and exposed through HAL, this would make it very hard to support and it conflicts with Ubuntu packages. So we will write a new frontend to HAL.

Use cases

Maisie wants to suspend her laptop but it doesn't work currently with Kubuntu because klaptopdaemon uses an obsolete method to detect if suspend is possible.

Rhuaridh wants to change the brightness of his laptop but finds that klaptopdaemon has no option to do this.

Boab wants to install kpowersave as the only reliable way to get power management in Kubuntu but finds this uninstalls several Ubuntu power management packages.

Scope

KDE frontend to the properties exposed by HAL. Any laptop specific issues should be solved below HAL.

Design

A systray icon to show the battery level and plugged in status. It will have a tooltip to show more information and a menu which lets you configure or run suspend/hibernate.

The applet check if power management is supported (using HAL) and only run if it is on startup.

The applet will have different settings for when the laptop is powered and battery, when the laptop changes from powered to battery is will change the brightness according to the setting.

It will talk to HAL using libhal. It will listen to HAL signals for battery level. It will query HAL for suspend/hibernate abilities (if one is not available that will be disabled in the GUI), and it will use HAL for starting the suspend and hibernate. It will use hal-system-power-set-power-save for standby mode.

Configuration dialogue:

http://kubuntu.org/~jriddell/power-config.png