announce: alternate power management

[pgf at laptop.org]

scott wrote:
 > 
 > >  > 3. with the OLPC kernel and this olpc-kbdshim and olpc-powerd (which by
 > >  > the way are really realy nice, thanks a million pgf!) the XO suspends
 > >  > when via "lid" switch and the power button. 
 > > 
 > > great!  did you try the grab keys and rotation?  (those are just
 > > olpc-kbdshim.)  "olpc-rotate" should spin the display, even if the
 > > buttons don't work.
 > 
 > Pressing the rotation button does nothing in GNOME or Sugar. Should this
 > be a general X rotation that should work in any X session?

hmm.  i wouldn't expect the button to work in gnome, but i'd
expect the sugar bindings to continue working.  the first check,
though, it to see if the olpc-rotate command works from terminal. 
when olpc-kbdshim installs, it patches sugar to run that command
rather than do its normal internal calls to xrandr.  so if the
command works, but the key doesn't, the debug path is pretty
short, at least, i think.  (is is possible that sugar installed
after olpc-kbdshim?  that would explain it.)

 > What are grab keys? I am not seeing any functionality for the gamepad
 > keys. In the OLPC Fedora/Sugar these enable me to get around the "scroll
 > bar is not draw even though content is larger than frame" fun.

the grab keys are the two with the little hands, at either side
of the space bar.  on an "industry standard" keyboard, they would
be the bear the "industry monopolist" logo. :-)  when you hold
either down, a using the touchpad should cause whatever you're
looking at to scroll.  (if it's capable, of course -- i.e., wide
or tall web pages, or terminal sessions with any amount of
scrollback.)

 > 
 > >  > 
 > >  > 4. In a GNOME session, this behaves oddly, as gnome-power-manager also
 > >  > intercepts the power button press and pops up a
 > >  > "hibernate/suspend/yadayada/" dialog, and then your XO suspends
 > >  > anyway :-)
 > > 
 > > yeah, i kind of expected that.  similar issues happen if you run
 > > ohmd alongside powerd as well.  is g-p-m (easily) uninstallable?
 > 
 > Yes. Very easy to remove.
 > 
 > One additional point related to power management, the control panel in
 > the current Sugar RPMs (for rawhide/F11) doesn't have the power settings
 > ("extreme power management" etc.) icon. Perhaps there is a gconf key to
 > enable that? I asked in #sugar but got no reply. Or, is this
 > functionality removed on purpose?

don't know.

i have several questions about how XO-specific hardware will be
supported going forward.  i assume the sugar folks would rather
not continue carrying hardware specific key-bindings for rotation
and brightness for instance, but i don't know what their current
thoughts are.

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org