Power Management

[lardman]

I note that DPMS is used for power management. This provides screen switch off and overall suspend functionality, but there\'s no easy way to alter this behaviour depending upon on the battery/external power state.

Possibilities:

Provide a daemon which alters the values which dpms uses.
Provide a power management daemon (like apm I suppose).

Surely other people must be getting annoyed that their Zs suspend when on external power?!?

Any suggestions as to which direction?


Si

P.S. I also note that the battery applet reports that the battery is fully charged as soon as one plugs in the external power, I\'ll have to download the matchbox code and see if I can work out why this is.

[albertr]

I think there\'s a setting somewhere (\"Light & Power\" applet, perhaps?) which controls that. I.e. my 5500 doesn\'t suspend when on external power.
-albertr

[albertr]

While we are here, does anyone know how to turn off default screen saver? Or replace it with the one that does simply blank LCD?
-albertr

[albertr]

Oops, sorry, didn\'t realize that it\'s X11 board. Was speaking about Qtopia. Sorry again...
-albertr

[offthefront]

Surely other people must be getting annoyed that their Zs suspend when on external power?!?

I believe the only way to get round this at the moment is to quit out of X.
In my experiments with different values for the suspend values for dpms, it seems like it is not possible to last any longer than about 20mins before a suspend kicks in. Values smaller than this seem to work as expected. Is it possible this is a bug?

Sue.

[lardman]

I don\'t know, but I don\'t think that using dpms as the main power management system is a good idea. This is a handheld, with a battery, etc. which makes it a bit of a different proposition, and DPMS is not configurable enough IMHO.

I\'d be inclined to use apmd or similar like OZ (and the Sharp ROMs too).

I\'ll have to look into it.


Si

[lardman]

The masterplan:

Run a daemon which will handle power management.

After asking the question of how these things are done in Qtopia/Opie, it looks like most stuff is rather high level - lack of keypresses/pointer activity is detected inside Qtopia/Opie whihc then alters the backlight settings and suspends when it is supposed to.

I propose to have a daemon which will do much the same, but for pdaXrom. I\'m planning to base this on the xscreensaver source - which starts after X minutes of inactivity, etc.

xscreensaver can use the XIdle extension (which isn\'t available anymore afaik), the MIT-SCREEN-SAVER extension (which is there) or simply by monitoring all open windows for keypress/pointer activity. DPMS may as well be used to blank out the display (it can be called to make the changes immediately), but I presume another level will be needed to do the backlight before blanking.

Just thought I\'d tell you what I\'d found and what I plan to do, and also to ask if anyone else has already looked at doing this.

Cheers,


Si