Changing the brightness on the desktop

I've just merged Benjamin Canou's new brightness applet into gnome-power-manager CVS. It's still WIP, but it looking good already.


Some sweet applet action…

If you've got a laptop without brightness buttons, you can now change the brightness easily. And yes, before anyone has a coronary, this is an applet and not another notification area icon, so you have to add it manually if you want it.
We have chosen to integrate this with g-p-m and not use HAL method calls directly as g-p-m is the policy agent. This means it's doing some clever things in the background – for instance dimming your screen when the computer session is idle, or changing your brightness when you are on battery power, and we have to be a bt clever when we try to change things manually.
Now, I've got no problem moving this applet into gnome-applets long term if desired, but for the moment the BrightnessLcd interface for g-p-m is not stable, and might change at a moments notice. You'll have to manually add –enable-applets to the gnome-power-manager configure line if you want to build this from CVS now.

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hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

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