Scary, huh? On a side note, hello Planet, this is my first post that will actually get syndacated. I excuse for giving you updates on what I work on just now, though I’m really dumb about RSS feeds, so credits to Riddell for 1) adding me to the planet 2) showing me how to filter RSS by categories

Anyway, some of you might know what PowerDevil is, some might not; well, for you who fear this is yet another attempt of threatening your lives, PowerDevil is a power manager for KDE4, and it won’t kill you. Credits to sandsmark for this beautiful name 😀

Being serious for a moment, PowerDevil takes a pretty different approach than all other KDE-based powermanagers until now. PowerDevil is lightweight, and I mean for real, and it’s fully integrated in your KDE Desktop. This is because PowerDevil it’s not the usual application you see in the tray, but just a KDED module, aka a daemon. Right, everything happens in background and you don’t have to care. And, for your battery’s sake, it doesn’t poll your system. I spent some time refining some existing algorythms, and I think I have reached the maximum level of efficency.

It is splitted in 2 main components: the daemon and a KCModule to configure it. But let me show you something 🙂

This is the heart of PowerDevil. Yes, it is profile based, and you can create them easily thanks to this interface. Important:It really needs an usability review, consider this as a cry for help 🙂 But I was saying…Thanks to this, you can create your profiles, fit them to your needs, and assign them to the correct event, so that the right profile will kick in at the right time.

Now some bits on its architecture: PowerDevil is fully based on solid, and I mean 100%. It is also able to detect your system’s capabilities, so that only supported configuration options will be shown to you. Nice, isn’t it?

You probably wonder how you’ll get all those nice messages old powermanagers used to stream to you. The answer is simple: KNotification! PowerDevil streams every info you’d like to hear through KNotification, like Kopete does 🙂 So you won’t miss a single bit of what’s happening in your system. Or you can simply disable them and enjoy a real background experience.

So far so good, though you probably wonder where to see system status, where to change profiles manually and so on. The answer is easy, and it’s Plasma.

PowerDevil, as I told you, is tightly integrated in your desktop, and this means with Plasma too. The KRunner lets you do about everything you want: changing profile, governor, and so on. Try some keywords like “power profile”, “power governor”, “screen brightness”, just to name some, and find out how fast and easy it is managing PowerDevil through KRunner.

Goodies are not over, and a Plasmoid is coming, letting you do everything the KRunner already does. The engine in kdebase has already been extended, and sebas is working on the Battery applet to bring you another I-must-have-it plasmoid on your dashboard.

So, want to give it a shot? PowerDevil is, at the moment, in kdereview, but will be soon moved to kdebase and will be the default powermanager in KDE 4.2. It works cool on KDE4.1 too (we kdemod guys are already using it), so you can already taste how it looks like.

Comments, help, feedback, insults and whatever are always welcome 🙂

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Posted in KDE, KDEmod, Linux, Qt

Tags: Add new tag, kde, kdemod, power management, powerdevil