Ubuntu recently started including GNOME Power Manager in main, and while it has been in universe for a while, it never had the underlying support from the acpi-support package until quite recently. So finally today I got it working (missing dep on libpam-foreground took a while to track down), and what can I say? It rocks … this and Network Manager are an amazing combination for laptop users, so roll on GNOME 2.16 when hopefully they will be included.
Best things about GNOME Power Manager:
- Sliding the screen brightness slider alters the screens brightness – Instant apply at its finest!
- Actually being able to control what happens when I close my laptop lid without having to alter files on disk.
- Control over whether the battery icon is showing anything (or in my case make it dissappear when it isn’t saying anything useful).
Congrats to Richard Hughes on such a brilliant bit of software.
Nice idea, but (AFAICT, and IIRC) it only supports laptop batteries. It’s somewhat frustrating that my laptop has a battery, and my desktop has a battery (UPS), but they require completely different sets of software (both internally, and user interfaces) to monitor.
j.r., GNOME Power Manager can deal with UPS also! See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=329027 — the caveat is that HAL has to have an addon for your type of UPS — at the moment only APC UPS’s are supported. It’s pretty trivial to convert a NUT module to a HAL addon if you need to (and I can help if required).
And Crispin: Thanks for the praise, it makes a humble programmer very proud — thanks.