RE: 2.4 Proposed Modules - battfink

[Glynn Foster <glynn foster sun com>]

Hey there,

> So, what's DPMS? Sorry for my ignorance. An official URL might be nice.

DPMS = Display Power Management Signaling. It's only used for displays
to suspend, standby and shut them down -

	http://webpages.charter.net/dperr/dpms.htm

It's completely seperate from the battery status icon.

> As I understand it, there's 2 laptop suspend systems - APM and ACPI. How
> does battfink know what to use?

Right, battfink tries to use ACPI, and then falls back to APM. Most X
servers should have the DPMS extension, but obviously not all systems
have APM - the configure *should* check for the existance, and not show
the battery part of the UI, but I haven't checked this.

Power management needs to be supported at a kernel level really - it's
pretty lame on Linux, from my initial investigations. Originally I was
trying to duplicate some of the settings in the CDE power management
dialog [dtpower, Solaris' power management is better] the windows one -
unfortunately I had to pick the lowest common denominator. At the time I
didn't think anyone would really use this, but now that people do, it
might be worth trying to come up with some code to use whatever is on
the system.

			See ya,
				Glynn ;)