Hi everyone,

a lot of code has been flowing into the new KDE Power Management system, and there are some good news both for users and developers. Let’s start from our beloved KDE heroes 🙂

Inhibiting screen Power Management

You are probably already familiar with suspension inhibition, but now Solid provides you with a brand new killer feature: inhibiting screen power management! This is done through Solid::PowerManagement::beginSuppressingScreenPowerManagement, and works exactly like suspension inhibition. So many apps such as Okular, Dragon Player and friends might want to implement this feature in time for 4.6 – it’s just 3 lines of code, and will grant users with a much improved experience.

For this reason, the Presentation profile is gone: we no longer need it! At the moment, though, this still does not inhibits the screensaver. I’ll code up a patch for it and submit it for review for enabling this in the next days. By the way, this feature should be a big improvement to current KDE’s usabilty on mobile devices.

Notifying on resume

The brand new org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement DBus service/interface gained a new signal, resumingFromSuspend. Any app can hook into that for getting notified about a resume from suspension event, which can easily fix annoying bugs such as this one.

And now, to users!

New UPower features embraced

Thanks to Lukas’ efforts, the new UPower backend saw some great improvements in features, such as keyboard backlight control. Unfortunately, some of the features will be available only with the upower backend (the resume signal is one of those), which shouldn’t be a big problem to anyone running linux nowadays.

Policy agent improvements

The policy agent has been vastly improved: it is now able to remove inhibitions if an app crashed or exited without releasing its cookies, and it has a much smarter handling of policies. Moreover, all of the actions gained policy control for free, so if your applications behave correctly, you should be fine with defaults!

Improved default profiles

The default profile generator got a big improvement since last time, and the generation of profiles is much more reliable, and adapts great to your PC’s configuration. Again, it should provide a very sensible default you should not need to change.

On a side note, today I’ve gone bug triaging and closed *lots* of bugs. Most of them were actually unmaintained, solved-but-not-closed and duplicates, and some were things which no longer exist or should have been fixed for 4.6. The reason why I’ve done this (apart from the fact that it was badly needed) is that I wanted to get b.k.o ready for the new Power Management daemon in 4.6, and keep a sensible bug list (and hopefully more maintained) of still unsolved issues and features request. So be sure to test the new KDE Power Management system with the first KDE 4.6 beta and give your feedback!

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Posted in KDE, Linux, PowerDevil, Qt, Serious Stuff, Software

Tags: agent, brightness, hal dbus, kde, management, policy, power, powerdevil, suspend, system, upower