New F11 for XO-1.5 build 48

Chris Ball cjb at laptop.org
Mon Nov 30 19:07:48 EST 2009


Hi,

   > The advantages in terms of energy use must surely be tiny given
   > that we're talking about 5sec of reducing consumption by maybe
   > 0.5W.  On the other hand turning off the backlight completely
   > after a certain amount of time as a first measure to reduce power
   > consumption strikes me as an interesting alternative to the
   > current implementation...

We'll do both -- dim the backlight and suspend, and set an alarm for a
wakeup to turn off the screen altogether a few minutes later.  The
reason for leaving the backlight dimmed for a few minutes is that it
might be possible for you to continue to read the web or book page
that you're looking at while it's dimmed and we're saving the big
watts.

Dimming the screen when idle is extremely common for laptops; OS X
and gnome-power-manager do it too, so I don't think it's too much of
a distraction.  With the new versions of OHM, I do the dimming as a
fade rather than an atomic change, so that should help it be less
distracting too.  (If it still feels distracting, I could make the
fade take a little longer?  It takes around 150ms right now.)

Thanks,

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child



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