low power actions?

[Eben Eliason]

There are 2 or 3 things we want to do in userspace as the battery gets
low, neither of which have been implemented yet.

1. When the battery begins to get low (15%?) we can use the new (and,
actually, not quite finished) notification system to alert the user
that the battery is low and that they might want to consider finding a
power source.  This notification would appear in the lower-right
corner (the "device" corner), and be mostly unobtrusive.  Optionally,
we could have this notification occur several times as the battery
gets lower, but I don't want to overdo it.

2. When the battery gets critically low (5%?) and a shutdown is
imminent, we should display a modal alert which prevents further
interaction with the system, and strongly suggests (probably with a
nice graphic) that the machine be attached to power in order to
continue using it.  Once power is reconnected, the alert will
automatically be dismissed.

3. When the system gives up and resorts to a force shutdown/suspend,
we could change the content of the modal alert to indicate that the
state of open activities are being kept in the Journal, and the
machine is shutting down/suspending.

We could do a rough pass at (1), though the notification system is
fleshed out as much as it needs to be.  We could likely do (2,3) now.

- Eben


On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 11:20 AM, Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>   > my interest was piqued by someone on irc asking about automatic
>   > clean shutdowns for low power.  i was wondering whether we do that,
>   > and whether we do earlier user warnings ("your battery should be
>   > charged now in order to keep it healthy"), or perhaps forced
>   > suspends.
>
> Well, we shut off automatically in order to keep the battery healthy,
> so there's no user involvement needed there.
>
> I don't currently do anything in userspace on low power, but the feature
> of "shutting down should save state" is targeted at 8.2, and I think the
> Sugar side is done; I just need a way to trigger the state saving from
> OHM when power is low.  I've added the request to #6014.
>
> Thanks,
>
> - Chris.
> --
> Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>
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